4 ms·

This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity. People hate goverment bureaucracy, but it is there to make sure that money ends in the right ha

• subjectsigma 8y ago
  Don't donate to random charities, then. Donate to established ones with high levels of transparency or trust.
  • toomuchtodo 8y ago
    https://www.charitynavigator.org/ https://www.charitynavigator.org/
  • jefftk 8y ago
    https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.givewell.org/
• andrewla 8y ago
  > This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity What is the "this" here. Is it the fact that so little of the actual donated money reached the recipient? I'm not even certain that the ratio here is worse than US welfare. Some sources seem to say that only 25-40% of welfare reaches the recipients, with the remainder spent on various administrative programs and continuing education (which is hard to quantify in actual benefit). The source here is a digestion of [1], which is admittedly a bit dubious, but I haven't hunted down a better one yet. Or is "this" the unaccountability of the corruption? I think the jury is still out on that one (or rather, a jury has yet to be convened and an indictment has yet to be issued, though it seems like the civil judgment is at least making its way through the system). If the perpetrators get off without penalty, then I acknowledge your point. And I concede there is a larger point here in that an unknown amount of fraud for similar cases is never really accounted for; these people happened to get caught, but if money is being raised for a cancer patient without a family, and the patient never gets the money and passes away, then we'd probably never even hear about it. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-dont-go-directly-to-poor-people-anymore/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...
  • ajmurmann 8y ago
    The article you are citing indicates that the administrative overhead is less than 10% which isn't really all that bad. As you pointed out about another third (in more sane states) goes to other aid programs which yes is hard to quantify but arguably likely done with good intentions and far away from corruption or inefficiency.
    • andrewla 8y ago
      Explicit administrative overhead is one thing; the question is where is the money going. The "other" bracket is a big mystery, but even in the best case, the actual money is being given to people (instructors, etc.) who perform some acts, possibly measurable, possibly not, and not really in a competitive marketplace. Adding more oversight here would increase administrative overhead, so there's a tradeoff. Mc­Clure and D'Amico encouraged Bobbitt to enter rehab; and thus did some "work" for which they could grant themselves "reasonable" compensation. It's obvious that they went a bit overboard with the stealing of money, but it's just a slightly more accountable version of the endless quagmire that is government bureaucracy. And by accountable, I mean that if all goes well they will suffer a punishment for what they have done. My point is not so much that state-run welfare is worse than what these criminals have done to Bobbitt, merely that it isn't an open-and-shut case. For that matter, I'm not sure how this compares to other countries with a more extensive social safety net. And really, how this compares to various well-run charities, which often have funding structures that are as arcane as any government agency.
• toasterlovin 8y ago
  FWIW, some people might appreciate that charity is voluntary and not coerced.