16 ms·

A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system

A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population needs government assistance - "welfare queens" is largely a fiction -- the story comes from Linda Taylor[0], a woman who cheated the welfare system, but was caught, tried, and served prison time for her fraud. In other words, the system worked, but anyone relying on government assistance should be punished for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor

colechristensen 6y ago
I likewise know someone who intentionally makes as little money as possible in order to take advantage of state support program. Or to be more accurate, makes as much money as possible under the various limits for benefits while living in a comfortable (essentially inherited) situation. This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because the state allows it.
- dkural 6y ago
  Do you care to substantiate your anecdote?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I'm not sure what they could do to prove it, given that this is a pseudonymous forum and also that they probably aren't interested in revealing too much about their contact.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    I would not. Nobody asked me to substantiate my story about the homeless program. And I could point to social media posts admitting to this strategy to take advantage of these support programs, but I wouldn’t.
- standardUser 6y ago
  Fine. I see no problem with some small percentage of people gaming the system as long as the people who actually need help are not denied help (or forced through unreasonable hoops to get help).
  - mcguire 6y ago
    You don't understand, it's better for 10 innocent people to go to jail than for one guilty one to escape.
    - standardUser 6y ago
      Sounds like Boomer logic to me!
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Of course. These people exist. Wealthy people also seek to construct their retirement portfolio in order to minimize (or even eliminate) taxes. This is especially common and valuable now with ACA subsidies. But so what? The goal of a program should be effectively improving the functioning of society. That can still be a real outcome even if there are people who choose to be less productive so they can obtain benefits.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Well there's a motivation from some people to claim that people taking advantage of social programs don't exist, and the opposite as well to claim that social programs are overrun with fraud. So what? Neither is right, generally. The political discussion about social programs needs to be about how to maximize their effectiveness, not to be about this existential struggle between two sides who both deny reality.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  But why? Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare? These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse. If you want more people to work, push for higher wages. If you want people to be capable of working for less money, ensure that childcare, public transportation, and healthcare are subsidized enough to make those wages livable.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    They literally just didn't want to work. They had ample opportunity to work, were technically skilled in a desirable field, and had a job in that field for some time. There wasn't a mitigating circumstance outside of not wanting to work very much. If you have your housing set up for you, the state pays your healthcare and gives you food assistance, and you like cooking simple meals for yourself... well you don't actually need money for all that much. It wasn't a matter of earning a poverty wage or not, it was a matter of earning a middle class wage or not. They chose not because they figured out how to do so and live the life they wanted. There were social media posts boasting about this.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      Did they do the early retirement thing? Like pay off their house ASAP while dumping their salary into 401k and Roth? I ask because my family member tries something similar, but it only really works because I pay for their housing. It just doesn't seem possible to live on $350/mo otherwise.
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  When I have the discussion about safety nets the topic of these types of people come up regularly where conservatives tend to say they're mooches and a drain on society and liberals tend to say they're an uncommon edge case. I think they're both arguing about the wrong thing. I think this is the perfect outcome for the type of person who wants to live their life that way because the alternative, working somewhere, means they will be the worst coworker or employee you have ever had. They'll do just enough to not be fired and never enough to actually be worth their paycheck, walking the line and wasting resources that could be spent elsewhere. I've worked with this person and they destroy team morale and productivity without even trying, they're not bad people and I harbor no ill-will towards them, they just don't want to be there and have very few other options in our society. While I think we must take care not to create too much of incentive for this lifestyle, I will happily pay money out of my paycheck to not have to work with those that prefer it.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  So remove the 'limit', and instead make state support programs reduce by a fraction of the earned amount. I.e. (as I mentioned elsewhere), if every after tax dollar earned equaled 50 cents loss in state support...there is no ceiling any longer where it doesn't make sense to earn more, while at the same time cutting state support off entirely at 2x what it pays if you don't do anything.
- AaronM 6y ago
  I'm fine with that. The amount of governmental waste trying to keep people from abusing the social services net is likely to cost far more than a small number of people taking advantage of the system.
- fl0wenol 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you're framing it this way, but how is this a problem? The concept might be foreign to most HNers, but lots of people lack entrepreneurial spirit, they instead attempt to minimize pain in their lives. As long as it's sustainable, why worry? Do we want to drag people into productivity or just let them live their own lives? I think it's inefficient to do the former.
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  I know some people, who parasite on the system, by leveraging systemic knowledge via the stock market. Never really contributed anything of value in their whole life - whole systems of parasites with parasites on top.
readthenotes1 6y ago
It also comes from Parkinson's Law: give a full-time employee only one thing to do and it will become a full time job, even if it could be done more expeditiously. It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.
- pas 6y ago
  This is also known as the Agent-Principal problem. [0] Usually this is "solved" via "aligning incentives". [1] But as we all know from James Cameron's documentaries as he followed the Connors, it's not that easy to notice when things go awry. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... [1] https://intelligence.org/research/ https://intelligence.org/research/
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
I think the same idea extends into many other areas of government. The bureaucracy is set up to give the appearance that nobody is taking advantage of the system, and optimizes only for this outcome. So ironically, only those who devote their time to learning how to take advantage of the system are rewarded. The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services). In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.
- pas 6y ago
  The good intention behind mandatory fairness is to fight good old quid pro quo corruption. Of course it seems hard to separate "the hiring manager wants to work with them [because they are a great vendor]" from "the hiring manager wants to work with them because they pay for the hiring manager's kids' school and family vacation" without adequate documentation.
civilized 6y ago
The District Attorney who tried to prosecute Dr. Gokal, Kim Ogg [1], is a racial justice & equity-fetishizing Democrat. [1] https://www.kim-ogg.com/ https://www.kim-ogg.com/
meesles 6y ago
I'm generally for social welfare programs, however the idea of "welfare queens (and kings)" is NOT fiction. I come from Belgium which has this problem quite notoriously. It is quite common for people to be abusing the social programs to stay unemployed and make more income than blue-collar workers. Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing and simply using handouts to survive? If they worked, shouldn't they become more prosperous? Why don't they have goals and aspirations? If someone is depressed, let's get them help. If the education system has failed them, let's fix that. It's easy to conflate the symptoms with the root causes, however the symptoms should not be ignored because they are the most visible feedback to most regular people, and that affects their perception of the system.
- spion 6y ago
  UBI or progressive negative tax should solve this problem, no? (The idea is that a job always gets you more money than the base)
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Yeah. It's super easy to fix, if people wanted to fix it. Even with welfare, you just make it so every after tax dollar earned reduces the welfare check by 50 cents. Tada, incentive to work, and only when you're making double what welfare pays out do you stop receiving assistance. People may still 'take advantage' of it, by choosing not to work (if we got rid of all the systems requiring proof they're trying to find a job and etc), but honestly if the promise of making more no matter what they do, or how few hours they work, doesn't motivate them, I'm really not concerned about that loss of labor in the labor pool.
    - mgbennet 6y ago
      I don't know if the drop off of assistance can really work that well. Say UBI is 10000 fun-bucks. A person gets a crappy job that pays 5000 fun-bucks. Their total income is now 5000+(10000-5000*.5)=12500. By getting a job and working, they've only improved their situation by 2500. Any dollar they earn above the UBI is taxed at 50%, until they've "made it" to double UBI. This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the rich, and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like. Most proposals for UBI I've seen are truly universal, meaning that rich and poor alike are entitled to it.
fitzie 6y ago
Our welfare system is entirely rife with abuse. the tricks to avoid healthcare costs are exploited by foreigners and Americans alike, people who shift assets to enroll in medicaid or come here to retire with free health care are entirely abusing the system. prioritization in vaccination at the cost of incredible inneficiency is celebrated by the media and our political class. I'm not so upset about the cost as much as the delays it causes to herd immunity. which is presumably what this vaccination program is all about.
MisterTea 6y ago
> A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" Indeed. I also suspect "wrong people" is a slightly quieter dog whistle/code word for you know, "those people". I also wonder how the welfare cheater statictic compares to the disability cheater statistic. I'd even wager disability is far more abused than welfare by ablebodied workers who make good money and have homes. Now imagine if we used the same "wrong person" argument against disability and watch the same people who would vote against welfare vote in favor of disability because they might be affected.
trianglem 6y ago
I don’t know about welfare queens, but there are a massive number of older, white men blue collar workers who pretty much live off of disability for their “bad backs”

colechristensen 6y ago

I likewise know someone who intentionally makes as little money as possible in order to take advantage of state support program. Or to be more accurate, makes as much money as possible under the various limits for benefits while living in a comfortable (essentially inherited) situation. This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because the state allows it.

dkural 6y ago
Do you care to substantiate your anecdote?
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I'm not sure what they could do to prove it, given that this is a pseudonymous forum and also that they probably aren't interested in revealing too much about their contact.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I would not. Nobody asked me to substantiate my story about the homeless program. And I could point to social media posts admitting to this strategy to take advantage of these support programs, but I wouldn’t.
standardUser 6y ago
Fine. I see no problem with some small percentage of people gaming the system as long as the people who actually need help are not denied help (or forced through unreasonable hoops to get help).
- mcguire 6y ago
  You don't understand, it's better for 10 innocent people to go to jail than for one guilty one to escape.
  - standardUser 6y ago
    Sounds like Boomer logic to me!
UncleMeat 6y ago
Of course. These people exist. Wealthy people also seek to construct their retirement portfolio in order to minimize (or even eliminate) taxes. This is especially common and valuable now with ACA subsidies. But so what? The goal of a program should be effectively improving the functioning of society. That can still be a real outcome even if there are people who choose to be less productive so they can obtain benefits.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Well there's a motivation from some people to claim that people taking advantage of social programs don't exist, and the opposite as well to claim that social programs are overrun with fraud. So what? Neither is right, generally. The political discussion about social programs needs to be about how to maximize their effectiveness, not to be about this existential struggle between two sides who both deny reality.
mywittyname 6y ago
But why? Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare? These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse. If you want more people to work, push for higher wages. If you want people to be capable of working for less money, ensure that childcare, public transportation, and healthcare are subsidized enough to make those wages livable.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  They literally just didn't want to work. They had ample opportunity to work, were technically skilled in a desirable field, and had a job in that field for some time. There wasn't a mitigating circumstance outside of not wanting to work very much. If you have your housing set up for you, the state pays your healthcare and gives you food assistance, and you like cooking simple meals for yourself... well you don't actually need money for all that much. It wasn't a matter of earning a poverty wage or not, it was a matter of earning a middle class wage or not. They chose not because they figured out how to do so and live the life they wanted. There were social media posts boasting about this.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Did they do the early retirement thing? Like pay off their house ASAP while dumping their salary into 401k and Roth? I ask because my family member tries something similar, but it only really works because I pay for their housing. It just doesn't seem possible to live on $350/mo otherwise.
eightysixfour 6y ago
When I have the discussion about safety nets the topic of these types of people come up regularly where conservatives tend to say they're mooches and a drain on society and liberals tend to say they're an uncommon edge case. I think they're both arguing about the wrong thing. I think this is the perfect outcome for the type of person who wants to live their life that way because the alternative, working somewhere, means they will be the worst coworker or employee you have ever had. They'll do just enough to not be fired and never enough to actually be worth their paycheck, walking the line and wasting resources that could be spent elsewhere. I've worked with this person and they destroy team morale and productivity without even trying, they're not bad people and I harbor no ill-will towards them, they just don't want to be there and have very few other options in our society. While I think we must take care not to create too much of incentive for this lifestyle, I will happily pay money out of my paycheck to not have to work with those that prefer it.
lostcolony 6y ago
So remove the 'limit', and instead make state support programs reduce by a fraction of the earned amount. I.e. (as I mentioned elsewhere), if every after tax dollar earned equaled 50 cents loss in state support...there is no ceiling any longer where it doesn't make sense to earn more, while at the same time cutting state support off entirely at 2x what it pays if you don't do anything.
AaronM 6y ago
I'm fine with that. The amount of governmental waste trying to keep people from abusing the social services net is likely to cost far more than a small number of people taking advantage of the system.
fl0wenol 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're framing it this way, but how is this a problem? The concept might be foreign to most HNers, but lots of people lack entrepreneurial spirit, they instead attempt to minimize pain in their lives. As long as it's sustainable, why worry? Do we want to drag people into productivity or just let them live their own lives? I think it's inefficient to do the former.
PicassoCTs 6y ago
I know some people, who parasite on the system, by leveraging systemic knowledge via the stock market. Never really contributed anything of value in their whole life - whole systems of parasites with parasites on top.

readthenotes1 6y ago

It also comes from Parkinson's Law: give a full-time employee only one thing to do and it will become a full time job, even if it could be done more expeditiously. It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.

pas 6y ago
This is also known as the Agent-Principal problem. [0] Usually this is "solved" via "aligning incentives". [1] But as we all know from James Cameron's documentaries as he followed the Connors, it's not that easy to notice when things go awry. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... [1] https://intelligence.org/research/ https://intelligence.org/research/

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

I think the same idea extends into many other areas of government. The bureaucracy is set up to give the appearance that nobody is taking advantage of the system, and optimizes only for this outcome. So ironically, only those who devote their time to learning how to take advantage of the system are rewarded. The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services). In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.

pas 6y ago
The good intention behind mandatory fairness is to fight good old quid pro quo corruption. Of course it seems hard to separate "the hiring manager wants to work with them [because they are a great vendor]" from "the hiring manager wants to work with them because they pay for the hiring manager's kids' school and family vacation" without adequate documentation.

civilized 6y ago

The District Attorney who tried to prosecute Dr. Gokal, Kim Ogg [1], is a racial justice & equity-fetishizing Democrat. [1] https://www.kim-ogg.com/ https://www.kim-ogg.com/

meesles 6y ago

I'm generally for social welfare programs, however the idea of "welfare queens (and kings)" is NOT fiction. I come from Belgium which has this problem quite notoriously. It is quite common for people to be abusing the social programs to stay unemployed and make more income than blue-collar workers. Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing and simply using handouts to survive? If they worked, shouldn't they become more prosperous? Why don't they have goals and aspirations? If someone is depressed, let's get them help. If the education system has failed them, let's fix that. It's easy to conflate the symptoms with the root causes, however the symptoms should not be ignored because they are the most visible feedback to most regular people, and that affects their perception of the system.

spion 6y ago
UBI or progressive negative tax should solve this problem, no? (The idea is that a job always gets you more money than the base)
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Yeah. It's super easy to fix, if people wanted to fix it. Even with welfare, you just make it so every after tax dollar earned reduces the welfare check by 50 cents. Tada, incentive to work, and only when you're making double what welfare pays out do you stop receiving assistance. People may still 'take advantage' of it, by choosing not to work (if we got rid of all the systems requiring proof they're trying to find a job and etc), but honestly if the promise of making more no matter what they do, or how few hours they work, doesn't motivate them, I'm really not concerned about that loss of labor in the labor pool.
  - mgbennet 6y ago
    I don't know if the drop off of assistance can really work that well. Say UBI is 10000 fun-bucks. A person gets a crappy job that pays 5000 fun-bucks. Their total income is now 5000+(10000-5000*.5)=12500. By getting a job and working, they've only improved their situation by 2500. Any dollar they earn above the UBI is taxed at 50%, until they've "made it" to double UBI. This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the rich, and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like. Most proposals for UBI I've seen are truly universal, meaning that rich and poor alike are entitled to it.

fitzie 6y ago

Our welfare system is entirely rife with abuse. the tricks to avoid healthcare costs are exploited by foreigners and Americans alike, people who shift assets to enroll in medicaid or come here to retire with free health care are entirely abusing the system. prioritization in vaccination at the cost of incredible inneficiency is celebrated by the media and our political class. I'm not so upset about the cost as much as the delays it causes to herd immunity. which is presumably what this vaccination program is all about.

MisterTea 6y ago

> A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" Indeed. I also suspect "wrong people" is a slightly quieter dog whistle/code word for you know, "those people". I also wonder how the welfare cheater statictic compares to the disability cheater statistic. I'd even wager disability is far more abused than welfare by ablebodied workers who make good money and have homes. Now imagine if we used the same "wrong person" argument against disability and watch the same people who would vote against welfare vote in favor of disability because they might be affected.

trianglem 6y ago

I don’t know about welfare queens, but there are a massive number of older, white men blue collar workers who pretty much live off of disability for their “bad backs”