E.g. if a $1000 voucher is available for an apartment, why not a $500 one for a relative's room?

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In the U.S. (from what I've seen - I'm envious of those with commanding knowledge of the situation) there are occasional elections with very limited, pre-chosen slates of candidates that most people don't know personally. The last time I tried to contact my district city councilperson (albeit in a fairly large city), a secretary answered my email.

There's also the assumption (not to deny the stated correlation) that satisfaction is tied to economic welfare. My opinion is that while this is necessary, it's hardly sufficient, and a major issue is not only economic inequality but a general inequality in opportunities to have any sort of influence in societal operations. I think it would be better if more people could be big fishes in little ponds. The professional class that makes up the media is defacto big fish and has a bias and blind spots to this.

Furthermore, I believe a better description of what exists in the U.S. at least is that we have a representative oligarchy - elected officials primarily representing and serving rich business interests.

Please understand that this is not really a moral judgement on my part - it seems entirely predictable and probably unavoidable for this to happen in an age of breathtaking material and technological abundance coupled with confusion about larger social questions.

And in this case, is the issue weakness of will, or is the will determined to do what seems best based on its available knowledge?

Roughly 2,500 years ago two giants of ethical philosophy appeared on the scene in the form of Socrates (who can be learned about best through Plato's dialogues and Xenophon's underappreciated Socratic works) and Siddartha Guatama (I would recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path White Clouds as a reasonably unified source of his life and thought).

I know bringing those guys up probably seems sentimental, but I have lived experience with poverty, and political "realism" is only beneficial to those who have not as yet suffered the consequences of harmful patterns of behavior.

I think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol illustrates a pretty good path for the exceedingly wealthy to become heroes, but there's this problem of sentiment, isn't there? And yet sentiment is constantly appealed to in all forms of commercial advertising!

People don't even know why or how they are here. Siddartha and Socrates' responses were basically that the answers are difficult to articulate or fathom, but the real pressing issue is how best to live life, and their answers were basically to moderate and do no harm or wrong, at least as much as possible, because the real goods are non-material, and to do wrong actually harms the perpetrator more than the victim.

It's not necessary to be a materialist Marxist to embrace Hickel's "mission statement" that “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

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When will the sanctimonious get off of their high-horse?

(edit - but let me amend my original statement and then I'm leaving it at that: "I may add that I would guess the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.")

(edit - and it's my belief that emphysema/COPD is the most serious risk of chronic smoking, where basically the lungs just wear out.)