where's porridge?

Breakfast has way more dimensions.

it is a short term benefit.

Companies are the same that both give salaries to consumers and can up prices. More taxes on companies means higher prices, job cuts, less salary increases. It's not necessary to point out that your quote of the post-war economy is cherry-picking. Plus, after a war it's very easy to get a recovery, especially if you win it.

You talk about the US, but look at countries where the state is both heavy on taxes and inefficient. The point is that you delegate decisions on what do do and how to do it to very few people. They can be good, or be bad. Diversifying on an entire market is better.

The only thing that can save middle/low class consumers is the hope that the state won't increase taxes faster than we can save money. A culture of proper saving, of not falling for luxury items presented as necessary by our peers (or companies selling them), is the only way out. Focusing on what matters.

Most of us are instead living in the illusion that we can live a luxury life.

you are citing distortions of a free market to invoke more distortions. This is the spiral I'm talking about.

Every time UBI or some variant of it are presented, it is always presented as a benefit, so ti seems really nive. What I don't ever see addressed, is how it will work from a cost perspective. UBI is a cost: a Universal Basic Cost. Who will pay basic incomes? Businesses? The tax payers? In both of this cases, why resort to an inefficient method (the state setting prices) instead on relying on price formation as (roughly) it is today? I too don't care about moral, and I'm also sad that both supporters and detractors talk about morals. I'm honestly curious in how it could ever work: because money doesn't grow on trees, that is, value is not extracted from the Earth without labor (and innovation of technologies to work less for the same extraction work). So, in the end, it's a way of redistributing resources.

This is setting morals aside. Moral and ethics could be considered, but it's a far wider topic than a HN comment allows. An hint: nobody asks why a moral phenomenon came up in the first place. It must have had a function in society... maybe it still has today.