12 ms·

Spent a long time reading about how vast bureaucratic inefficiencies are created by people worrying that "the wrong person" will benefit from government program

• happytoexplain 6y ago
  This is the root of a lot of problems. We spend far too much energy making sure "bad people" get what they "deserve" and don't get what they "don't deserve", and put in too little of that same energy in the case of "all people".
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    And then when we don't spend that energy it's a huge scandal!
    • happytoexplain 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean - I'm using quotes because of the dubious definition of justice in the context of shared welfare, but obviously there are plenty of scenarios where more direct consequences for being more directly "bad", for various definitions, makes sense, or is at least unavoidable in a human society.
  • mumblemumble 6y ago
    This is a huge part of why, perhaps surprisingly, libertarian think tanks in the US have started pushing for universal basic income. The sheer weight of the bureaucracy that has accumulated due to this way of thinking means that replacing it with a straight-up program of unflinching wealth redistribution would actually make the government smaller. And also make markets freer. The amount of rent-seeking behavior around programs like WIC is just staggering. And it serves the interests of neither WIC recipients nor the general public; it's only there because pearl-clutching is easy to co-opt for financial gain.
    • clairity 6y ago
      this is an ideological argument devoid of meaningful goals to help residents and create a strong economy. who cares, on the face of it, what size the government is? size is not the goal, it's at best a poor proxy metric for (in-)efficiency, which itself is a proxy metric for how much we help people via public goods (and thereby the whole economy). rent-seeking around wic is a rounding error next to property & capital rent-seeking overall. moreover, the right place to place blame (and seek redress) is with the rent-seekers themselves, not the assistance recipients (or the associated governmental programs) being exploited by them.
      • mumblemumble 6y ago
        I'm not sure I see why killing the engine that fuels the rent-seeking gravy train, and, in the process of doing so, taking a huge monkey off the backs of people who are receiving assistance, would somehow misplace blame on those same people. It's simply suggesting that perhaps we should address a cause of the problem rather than only focusing on its symptoms. And the way in which the market gets freer, in this case, is by taking away unnecessary and paternalistic restrictions that WIC imposes on where recipients shop and what they're allowed to buy. Perhaps framing things in classical liberal terms feels like de-centering assistance recipients. I get that, but I'm not sure that's actually a bad thing, in this case. I can't imagine your average WIC participant actually wants to live under a microscope, regardless of the political leanings of the person who's looking through it.
        • clairity 6y ago
          you're mistakenly associating assistance programs with rent-seeking, and moreover focusing on an entirely irrelevant corner of it. rent-seeking will occur anywhere there is wealth to be extracted, which is basically everywhere else in the economy, so that association is unwarranted. you should be looking at where capital is concentrated and deployed if you're truly concerned about rent-seeking over "big government".
          • mumblemumble 6y ago
• _jal 6y ago
  A lot of people treat the government as authority to rank people, beliefs, etc. in importance. A lot of people, in fact, want the government to do this.
• A12-B 6y ago
  This is 90% of people's reaction to UBI.
• Ecstatify 6y ago
  I think in Israel if there is any vaccines left over from that day because people didn’t attend their appointment anyone can show up and get it. Our obsession with fairness is ridiculous.
• asmos7 6y ago
  Our education in the US is in the same position. We spend far more time, energy and money on problematic students who don't give a rip than we do on dedicated/motivated students. The goal posts aren't there. If a certain number of students fail it creates red flags for the district and if those students are a certain minority that can viewed as evidence of institutional racism and open up legal liabilities as such the districts are highly motivated to pass everyone along but to not to make the good and willing better.
  • TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Isn't the parent stating too many people are doing exactly what you're proposing, which is protesting that services are being provided to people who don't deserve it? (Separating children into deserving and undeserving categories of educational attention seems that way to me...)
    • da_big_ghey 6y ago
      Not separating into inherently deserving and undeserving, but those who desire a good education and those who do not. There are students in poor schools who push to become learned in spite of obstacles. Think Ben Carson for an example. And there are those who have tons of resources and opportunities but fail to use them, those who don't care about learning something. I knew quite a few of the former, people who would go to the library for extra study or to learn things after school. And I knew quite a few of the latter, who would go home and play video games or go out and drink, who didn't care about learning anything. In today's school system, the resources go to those who do not desire an education. This is because of programs like "no child left behind", and because a higher graduation rate looks better. But I think we should make a normative judgement that those who do not make an effort to better themselves should receive no support from society. Put less money into summer schools for kids who fail, and put more money into before- and after-school tutoring. This will benefit those who put in the effort to the detriment of those who don't care, which is a good trade-off.
      • Tostino 6y ago
• dqpb 6y ago
  Do you have any recommended reading?
• colechristensen 6y ago
  I was once involved with a young woman in a homeless program which was entirely defeated by this exact "wrong person" attitude. Get a homeless person an apartment? Great. But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making money and took most of your earnings away to pay for the housing. The program constantly threatened to take away your funding if the paperwork wasn't perfect. The program constantly made mistakes, paid rent late, and generally threatened a vulnerable homeless person with further homelessness. It was infuriating to experience this through another person. In attempts to help a person, these programs were taking vulnerable people, dangling housing in front of them, and constantly threatening them with taking it away. That is of course exactly the opposite of what you need to do to someone having trouble taking care of themselves, and sadly mirrors the abusive kinds of situation which so often leads people to homelessness.
  • logicchop 6y ago
    Fraud is real, and vast, and if it creeps in it undermines the whole thing. What's the alternative?
    • alasdair_ 6y ago
      Universal basic income.
      • mc32 6y ago
        Negative taxes are better. No need to give to the wealthy in the first place to come back and tax them later.
        • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
          It may seem pointless, but it may be administratively simpler. Similar to how people with government jobs still pay taxes, even though their paychecks come from the government in the first place.
• titzer 6y ago
  The incredible thing to me is even given that prevailing attitude, corporations still manage to soak the government for billions and billions. There are two sets of rules in this world.
• mchusma 6y ago
  This is why I generally support universal basic income if it could replace the US safety net. Currently we spend more than it would take to eliminate poverty if we just gave it away. But the beauracratic machine just destroys so much wealth.
  • abfan1127 6y ago
    > the bureaucratic machine just destroys so much wealth that can be said enough!
  • chadash 6y ago
    Do you have numbers? How much do we spend eliminating poverty? And how much would we spend on universal income? Assuming 200 million adults get universal income, that would cost $1 trillion per $5,000 of income. But $5000 hardly gets you out of poverty.
    • Dma54rhs 6y ago
      I suppose the question is does it mean people don't flock them to em super expensive overcrowded cities if they get UBI. I don't have an answer to it personally.
    • rjmunro 6y ago
      Normally Universal basic income plans are combined with abolition of most other welfare, and changes to taxes so that people on all but the lowest incomes end up paying the money back as tax. So maybe flatten all tax rates below 24%, everyone earning more than $80000 is now paying an extra $6000, but you give that back to them as the UBI. Everyone earning less than $80000 pays more tax than before but still gets $6000 UBI, so is better off.
  • adolph 6y ago
    the beauracratic machine just destroys so much wealth In theory I sympathize with the sentiment, but 1) the dole is not wealth 2) the administration costs of the dole don't make money disappear, its just routed into income for the admin workers, 3) the administration costs of the dole do not necessarily decrease with UBI and might increase given a larger population to administer. I generally do not support UBI since the key problem isn't cash in people's pockets, it is lack of engagement with society in ways that add value. UBI papers over the core problem.
• refurb 6y ago
  It’s a fundamental desire for fairness. Is it really that surprising? Once people start viewing the system as inherently unfair, then it can start to fall apart pretty quickly. Not saying that the vaccine situation in the article is an example of an unfair situation.
• badsectoracula 6y ago
  There is a comment exactly about this in the article: > Last week a local vaccine site had extra doses nearing the end of the day and word spread. Ultimately, they put them in the arms of whoever could get there in time. > I personally know two unrelated people who raced there and got vaccinated, despite not meeting the criteria mentioned in the article. The only criteria that mattered in this instance were being present and being willing. > This was also in Houston and at an “official” site. I attempted to get similarly lucky at the same site the next day by visiting at closing time. The worker that turned me away told me that because of complaints from those who missed out the day before, they were told to no longer accept walk-ins. I’m content to wait my turn, but that experience combined with this persecution story...I have to wonder how many doses are going to waste in my community.
• ip26 6y ago
  It's not just selfishness, I think we've run into something fundamentally unintuitive for people's lower brain. For much of human history, shutting out cheats & freeloaders was an important part of making good use of a resource. These days, we have hit a point where the bureaucratic overhead of shutting them out can become more expensive than just letting them in. That's not intuitive for people.
  • ironmagma 6y ago
    The problem with this take is that it’s more useful than just to preserve a resource. By allowing people to get away with fraud you are encouraging people to do it again, including ways that transcend whatever system that fraud was originally within. I don’t actually know that chasing pranksters has ever been an efficient use of time, but someone should chase them if we expect the boundaries of normal operation to be known as a society.
    • ip26 6y ago
      Right, the $36B lost to unemployment fraud (10% of payments) in the past 12 months definitely illustrates that some amount of guardrails are still appropriate. There is an optimum level somewhere in between where the sum total of losses & overhead together are minimized.
      • ryandrake 6y ago
        That $36B is a drop in the bucket on the scale of a country. It's 25% of Jeff Bezos's net worth. How many $B spent on enforcement is it worth to reduce that to, say, $30B?
        • ip26 6y ago
          If you read the news about it, the scams were depressingly basic & the screening failures were rudimentary. It will not cost billions of dollars to rein that number in dramatically.
• kryogen1c 6y ago
  the real problem is that two core issues exist in opposition: 1) what is the most cost efficient way to solve the problem 2) how people feel about the chosen solution solving 1 does not automatically solve 2. the slider between anarchocapitalism and state-owned and -operated socialism belongs somewhere in the middle and everyone wants to tug it into a different spot. if theres anything the internet + social media is teaching us, its that the public has a very, very bad habit of watching one 15 second video of anecdata and vigorously extrapolating, thinking they have arrived at actual data. all it would take is a couple tweets about some homeless asshole partying in his free government house with his foodstamp money to upset 2 and overthrow 1, even if it was the best solution on the spreadsheet.
  • sudosysgen 6y ago
    There is no slider between state socialism and anarchocapitalism. Economically, there are quite a few more axes. It's possible to have full socialism without anymore state ownership than today, and it's possible to have capitalism with a lot of state ownership, and it's also possible to have cybernetics-market chimera to organize the economy.
• cameldrv 6y ago
  This is the flip side of it though: https://abc7news.com/california-edd-unemployment-fraud-ca-scam-insurance/10011810/ https://abc7news.com/california-edd-unemployment-fraud-ca-sc... $30 billion in unemployment fraud in just a year, in just one state.
  • pas 6y ago
    "The EDD says it is working to verify the identities of people who made claims and many remain under investigation" It's identity fraud. (Entirely because of the tragic state of US [and global] privacy and state-citizen communication culture.) It's not people taking advantage of welfare and deciding to not look for work. It's career criminals.
    • cameldrv 6y ago
      I agree that it's career criminals, many of whom are even overseas. The problem is that these agencies have to be able to distinguish legitimate vs. fraudulent claims, and sometimes the processes they come up for doing this could be described as "jumping through hoops."
  • tzs 6y ago
    How does that compare to other years, both in total amount of fraud and in what percent of total paid out was for fraudulent claims? If the system is fine except in situations like a once a century global pandemic that throws way more people out of work than normally happens even in most recessions and throws them out of work for longer than is normal where it jumps to a fraud rate of 30% or so (and presumably returns to normal when the pandemic is over), I'm OK with that.
• bko 6y ago
  I see it more as a power play by the regulating agencies to maintain control. NY Governor Cuomo for instance threatened severe penalties for anyone stepping out of line. If the "undeserving" argument were true, there wouldn't be talk about increasing eligibility to the prison population, especially given their low mortality rates compared to 65+