Is your vote being bought with your own money? In this video, I break down the “cash for votes” culture that’s spreading across India—where governments spend lakhs of crores to buy the most expensive thing on the market: your vote. I start with the Supreme Court rapping Tamil Nadu over the “100 units free electricity for everyone” plan, and use that to explain what freebies are—and what they are not. Social schemes can be necessary in a poor country, but the real question is: do states even have the money, and what’s the trade-off? Then I simplify the boring-but-deadly part: revenue deficit. When a state’s day-to-day spending (including cash transfers) exceeds its income, it borrows—meaning the interest is paid by us, because it’s our tax money. Using PRS data, I walk through Bihar’s pre-election cash distribution, Bengal’s expanded schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar and Yuva Sathi, and the women-targeted playbook across parties—from Ladli Behna to Ladki Bahin and Lakhpati Bitiya. The punchline is ugly: welfare gets weaponized, opposition copies it, deficits rise, development spending gets squeezed, and we get stuck in an infinite loop where shutting schemes becomes politically impossible.