Maybe… Do both? Lower the taxes and give stipends for the disabled and those who can barely hold their income? So those same people can buy things cheaper?
It’s funny how people don’t realize this is the actual solution and are downvoting. In reality lowering taxes for everyone achieves the exact same thing. Yet people would rather have a set of money each month given to them, despite the incredible bureaucracy that it requires, with it probably eating up 30% of the funds then.
Well, you generally don’t want your characters to be redundant though. A boy genius finding it hard to integrate with the crew (which was where it was heading, with the famous “shut up Wesley” being an example, or that Picard didn’t want children on the bridge) is quite close to wondorous machine that doesn’t fully understand what it means to be human finds it hard to integrate with the crew etc
I liked him. They could’ve made the “boy genius” storyline a bit better, but then the “genius” part overlaps with Data too much I guess. Also, he shouldn’t have had issues getting into the academy at all