8 ms·

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 not

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.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the rich not really, when you consider who must be paying for the original 10000 fun bucks. the person in your example is still achieving an effectively negative tax rate. > and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like. this much I agree with. the 50% falloff is probably much too steep.
    - thomastjeffery 6y ago
      When someone has enough to meet their basic needs, $2,500 can go a long way. Over the last year, Americans have gotten about that much in "stimulus", but many of us had to spend it all on rent and other bills.
    - kbelder 6y ago
      It also breaks down when there are multiple overlapping programs, as there are now. Maybe each program drops $0.25 for every dollar earned... but if you are on four or more means-tested programs, that's completely removed the benefit. Similar are the many programs that have cutoff at, say, 150% poverty level. Individually not a big deal, but when you lose a multitude of different benefits going from 25k to 35k income, it can be a perverse incentive.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      Yep. UBI -is- meant to be universal, and I'd be for it. I'm just saying, even without a UBI, the existing system could be made to work. 50% is just a number thrown out there; it can be reduced, it can be non-linear. The point is that as long as there is no cliff, no point where if you make $1 extra by working you net -lose- money, we avoid the existing issue. As to whether there is enough utility at any given total income to warrant the extra work...that's a 'problem' we have now, and always will have. Presented with the opportunity, do I want to turn my time into money? That's entirely dependent on how much I value each of those things. There's actually a reason I chose 50%, beyond it just being a nice round number. See, if the federal minimum wage was upped to $15 at the same time as changing welfare like this, we'd be able to institute the fall off while making the benefit of working those hours feel like the same amount of buying power as working now. Only difference is, essentially, that everyone making less than 2x welfare/etc benefits, would see a larger increase even than that.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    How is it a super easy fix? It seems extremely unaffordable. Forget incentive to work. The US had a tax revenue of $3.5 trillion with a population of a 330 million. You shut down the entire government and spend it on UBI. That's $883 per person per month. But it's worse than that. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air. Money might, but money only matters insofar as what you can spend it on. If only 300 million apples are produced then no amount of moving money around will allow everyone (330m) to get an apple. You're not poor when your dollar wealth or income is low, you're poor when you can't get the stuff you need or want. If you want to have a UBI without sending prices of everyday goods soaring then you need cheap production of those goods in quantities that will satisfy your population. The only realistic way of doing this in the modern world is automation. The cost of production for a lot of (most?) goods comes down to how much it costs all of the human labor that's combined to produce it. Eg in the case of apples somebody has to select which apple trees to grow, acquire land, invest in it, maintain them, pick the apples, sort them, find a buyer, transport them etc. All of these require some human labor and therefore have some significant cost. The more of this you can automate the lower the costs of these apples. Whether UBI works will ultimately come down to the efficiency of production (or alternatively, shifting the poverty to another country that does the cheap production for you, but this can't last). You need to be able to satisfy the needs of the population with the labor of the part of the population that are net tax contributors.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      you're arguing a tangent to GP's point, which could be rephrased as "assuming we're already willing to spend $x on welfare, we can structure the payments in a way that effective income increases monotonically as the recipients earn higher wages for work". you can fix welfare cliffs without spending any more/less money.
chefkoch 6y ago
If you get more money from welfare than from work iguess you would be eligible for more support. I would be interested in a ranking where gouvernemnt subsedies (welfare, agriculture, infrastracture, defense etc.) are abused most. My guess is it's not welfare.
floatingatoll 6y ago
I would think that given what we’ve done here in the US to the past forty years of workers, they’ve earned a decade off to live on UBI and heal from burnout and develop interests of any sort in anything at all again, before we could even begin to productively analyze their reactions to UBI. They’ve been traumatized and it will take time to heal and I certainly hope that we implement UBI and let them do so. We can afford it as a country and god knows they’ve done enough for us to have earned a break from work if they need time to heal.
- skrowl 6y ago
  210,000,000 working age adults in the USA * 40,000/year UBI welfare handouts * a decade = 84 TRILLION dollars. The US govt is currently spending about 2 trillion / year more than they take from their citizens in taxes. Out of curiosity, what makes you think "We can afford it as a country"?
  - karpierz 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, why did you cite a "deficit per year" figure for context, but provide a "cost per decade" figure for UBI?
    - alphameese 6y ago
      Also who’s proposing a 40000 / year UBI? Most figures I’ve seen are for 2000 / month, aka 24000 / year.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    The alternative to affording it seems worse. And your figured are rather assumptive, ignoring critical implementation details like “UBI could be written as a tax credit” or so on. But, let’s take your numbers and scenario briefly anyways. $4T per year is only 15% of GDP, right? 15% is the capital gains tax, and technically GDP is the measure of a country’s capital gained, so just apply the 15% capital gains tax to the country’s capital. “But that’s a lot!” Yup. “Is GDP growing enough?!” Not the way we treat workers today; the last time it was above 5% was, coincidentally, right when the wage/efficiency gap started widening. “How do we make the math work then?” Good question. What figures make your approach work, given historical rates of GDP and growth pre-Reagan, post-Reagan, and in a theoretical world where pre-Reagan rates return once we stop abusing our workers? I was just making the point that we have a lot of healing to do before we can presume to measure under UBI the contributions and growth and courage and strength of mind and will from the workers we’ve abused for forty years. You’re making an argument that, I think (?), we can’t afford to allow 100% of our working age citizens to subsist on UBI. So tell us what figures you think would plausibly work in your own terms, so that we can see your complete viewpoint and argument. Is that $100/person/month or $1000? Are you accounting for GDP growth over ten years or not? What percentage of workers can we afford to carry on UBI for ten years? And so on. Do the numbers work out better if you factor in an imaginary 50T reclaimed through taxation/levy/law from those who’ve accumulated it and transfer the entire sum directly into the UBI payout fund? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102709 It’s fine to try and use math to argue your point, but being sarcastically dismissive with simple algebra hasn’t given me enough to give your point consideration, as I’m still not even sure I understand it yet. I did my best and I hope the above is some use to others, but I’m not confident at all that I understood well enough to reply to you.
mcguire 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." I would like to learn more about the issue. Do you have any references handy?
bko 6y ago
There's also cases where if you start working, you actually make less than you would by not working, due to eligibility requirements for certain programs. Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. But going to a grueling 9-5 to make less money for long term benefits is still a tough sell
- jszymborski 6y ago
  > Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. Not working leads to... substance abuse? That sounds like some very puritanical " Idle hands are the devil's workshop" mentality. What's more, what is so meaningful about being overworked, underappreciated, and paid less than a living wage? That soul crushing work is where you start to see people seeking escape and/or less-than-legal sources of income. In fact, what you often seen is that, given enough breathing room to do so, people can achieve remarkably productive works. Linus Torvalds and J.K. Rowling are oft-cited examples of people who created magnum opuses while on benefits. Had their days been occupied working multiple minimum wage jobs, we might never have gotten Linux or Harry Potter.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Why don't they have goals and aspirations? Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something, and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating. Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.) Yes, some unemployed people might turn to drink, drugs, or petty crime, but this can be solved by building community infrastructure. The ills of the Parisian banlieues, for example, are often ascribed not just to unemployment, but to the fact that all the cultural and leisure facilities that were promised back in the 1970s were never actually built.
- nickff 6y ago
  Your comment actually illustrates one thing I find repulsive about basic income proposals; many people seem to want basic income to finance a life of vanity, where they help no one more than themselves.
  - mofosyne 6y ago
    Still more ethical than a vegan having to compromise their morals by taking a butchering job because they can't find any other jobs and need to feed their kids and have a roof over their head.
    - nickff 6y ago
      That seems like a false choice.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    > ...a life of vanity, where they help no one more than themselves. This is what most people do anyway. So, what's the problem?
yowzadave 6y ago
It's important to remember that the unemployed are just one small part of all non-workers that social-welfare programs are intended to assist. In addition to the unemployed, you have children, the elderly, the disabled, students, and unpaid caretakers. In the US at least, the burden for supporting many of these non-workers falls on their individual families. Why do you think such attention is paid to "welfare queens (and kings)" whenever the welfare state is brought up, even though they are just a fraction of one group that the welfare state is intended to support? Do you think it could be precisely because there's an easy narrative that gets people viscerally worked up about unfairness?

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.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the rich not really, when you consider who must be paying for the original 10000 fun bucks. the person in your example is still achieving an effectively negative tax rate. > and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like. this much I agree with. the 50% falloff is probably much too steep.
  - thomastjeffery 6y ago
    When someone has enough to meet their basic needs, $2,500 can go a long way. Over the last year, Americans have gotten about that much in "stimulus", but many of us had to spend it all on rent and other bills.
  - kbelder 6y ago
    It also breaks down when there are multiple overlapping programs, as there are now. Maybe each program drops $0.25 for every dollar earned... but if you are on four or more means-tested programs, that's completely removed the benefit. Similar are the many programs that have cutoff at, say, 150% poverty level. Individually not a big deal, but when you lose a multitude of different benefits going from 25k to 35k income, it can be a perverse incentive.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Yep. UBI -is- meant to be universal, and I'd be for it. I'm just saying, even without a UBI, the existing system could be made to work. 50% is just a number thrown out there; it can be reduced, it can be non-linear. The point is that as long as there is no cliff, no point where if you make $1 extra by working you net -lose- money, we avoid the existing issue. As to whether there is enough utility at any given total income to warrant the extra work...that's a 'problem' we have now, and always will have. Presented with the opportunity, do I want to turn my time into money? That's entirely dependent on how much I value each of those things. There's actually a reason I chose 50%, beyond it just being a nice round number. See, if the federal minimum wage was upped to $15 at the same time as changing welfare like this, we'd be able to institute the fall off while making the benefit of working those hours feel like the same amount of buying power as working now. Only difference is, essentially, that everyone making less than 2x welfare/etc benefits, would see a larger increase even than that.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  How is it a super easy fix? It seems extremely unaffordable. Forget incentive to work. The US had a tax revenue of $3.5 trillion with a population of a 330 million. You shut down the entire government and spend it on UBI. That's $883 per person per month. But it's worse than that. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air. Money might, but money only matters insofar as what you can spend it on. If only 300 million apples are produced then no amount of moving money around will allow everyone (330m) to get an apple. You're not poor when your dollar wealth or income is low, you're poor when you can't get the stuff you need or want. If you want to have a UBI without sending prices of everyday goods soaring then you need cheap production of those goods in quantities that will satisfy your population. The only realistic way of doing this in the modern world is automation. The cost of production for a lot of (most?) goods comes down to how much it costs all of the human labor that's combined to produce it. Eg in the case of apples somebody has to select which apple trees to grow, acquire land, invest in it, maintain them, pick the apples, sort them, find a buyer, transport them etc. All of these require some human labor and therefore have some significant cost. The more of this you can automate the lower the costs of these apples. Whether UBI works will ultimately come down to the efficiency of production (or alternatively, shifting the poverty to another country that does the cheap production for you, but this can't last). You need to be able to satisfy the needs of the population with the labor of the part of the population that are net tax contributors.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    you're arguing a tangent to GP's point, which could be rephrased as "assuming we're already willing to spend $x on welfare, we can structure the payments in a way that effective income increases monotonically as the recipients earn higher wages for work". you can fix welfare cliffs without spending any more/less money.

chefkoch 6y ago

If you get more money from welfare than from work iguess you would be eligible for more support. I would be interested in a ranking where gouvernemnt subsedies (welfare, agriculture, infrastracture, defense etc.) are abused most. My guess is it's not welfare.

floatingatoll 6y ago

I would think that given what we’ve done here in the US to the past forty years of workers, they’ve earned a decade off to live on UBI and heal from burnout and develop interests of any sort in anything at all again, before we could even begin to productively analyze their reactions to UBI. They’ve been traumatized and it will take time to heal and I certainly hope that we implement UBI and let them do so. We can afford it as a country and god knows they’ve done enough for us to have earned a break from work if they need time to heal.

skrowl 6y ago
210,000,000 working age adults in the USA * 40,000/year UBI welfare handouts * a decade = 84 TRILLION dollars. The US govt is currently spending about 2 trillion / year more than they take from their citizens in taxes. Out of curiosity, what makes you think "We can afford it as a country"?
- karpierz 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, why did you cite a "deficit per year" figure for context, but provide a "cost per decade" figure for UBI?
  - alphameese 6y ago
    Also who’s proposing a 40000 / year UBI? Most figures I’ve seen are for 2000 / month, aka 24000 / year.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  The alternative to affording it seems worse. And your figured are rather assumptive, ignoring critical implementation details like “UBI could be written as a tax credit” or so on. But, let’s take your numbers and scenario briefly anyways. $4T per year is only 15% of GDP, right? 15% is the capital gains tax, and technically GDP is the measure of a country’s capital gained, so just apply the 15% capital gains tax to the country’s capital. “But that’s a lot!” Yup. “Is GDP growing enough?!” Not the way we treat workers today; the last time it was above 5% was, coincidentally, right when the wage/efficiency gap started widening. “How do we make the math work then?” Good question. What figures make your approach work, given historical rates of GDP and growth pre-Reagan, post-Reagan, and in a theoretical world where pre-Reagan rates return once we stop abusing our workers? I was just making the point that we have a lot of healing to do before we can presume to measure under UBI the contributions and growth and courage and strength of mind and will from the workers we’ve abused for forty years. You’re making an argument that, I think (?), we can’t afford to allow 100% of our working age citizens to subsist on UBI. So tell us what figures you think would plausibly work in your own terms, so that we can see your complete viewpoint and argument. Is that $100/person/month or $1000? Are you accounting for GDP growth over ten years or not? What percentage of workers can we afford to carry on UBI for ten years? And so on. Do the numbers work out better if you factor in an imaginary 50T reclaimed through taxation/levy/law from those who’ve accumulated it and transfer the entire sum directly into the UBI payout fund? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102709 It’s fine to try and use math to argue your point, but being sarcastically dismissive with simple algebra hasn’t given me enough to give your point consideration, as I’m still not even sure I understand it yet. I did my best and I hope the above is some use to others, but I’m not confident at all that I understood well enough to reply to you.

mcguire 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." I would like to learn more about the issue. Do you have any references handy?

bko 6y ago

There's also cases where if you start working, you actually make less than you would by not working, due to eligibility requirements for certain programs. Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. But going to a grueling 9-5 to make less money for long term benefits is still a tough sell

jszymborski 6y ago
> Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. Not working leads to... substance abuse? That sounds like some very puritanical " Idle hands are the devil's workshop" mentality. What's more, what is so meaningful about being overworked, underappreciated, and paid less than a living wage? That soul crushing work is where you start to see people seeking escape and/or less-than-legal sources of income. In fact, what you often seen is that, given enough breathing room to do so, people can achieve remarkably productive works. Linus Torvalds and J.K. Rowling are oft-cited examples of people who created magnum opuses while on benefits. Had their days been occupied working multiple minimum wage jobs, we might never have gotten Linux or Harry Potter.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Why don't they have goals and aspirations? Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something, and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating. Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.) Yes, some unemployed people might turn to drink, drugs, or petty crime, but this can be solved by building community infrastructure. The ills of the Parisian banlieues, for example, are often ascribed not just to unemployment, but to the fact that all the cultural and leisure facilities that were promised back in the 1970s were never actually built.

nickff 6y ago
Your comment actually illustrates one thing I find repulsive about basic income proposals; many people seem to want basic income to finance a life of vanity, where they help no one more than themselves.
- mofosyne 6y ago
  Still more ethical than a vegan having to compromise their morals by taking a butchering job because they can't find any other jobs and need to feed their kids and have a roof over their head.
  - nickff 6y ago
    That seems like a false choice.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  > ...a life of vanity, where they help no one more than themselves. This is what most people do anyway. So, what's the problem?

yowzadave 6y ago

It's important to remember that the unemployed are just one small part of all non-workers that social-welfare programs are intended to assist. In addition to the unemployed, you have children, the elderly, the disabled, students, and unpaid caretakers. In the US at least, the burden for supporting many of these non-workers falls on their individual families. Why do you think such attention is paid to "welfare queens (and kings)" whenever the welfare state is brought up, even though they are just a fraction of one group that the welfare state is intended to support? Do you think it could be precisely because there's an easy narrative that gets people viscerally worked up about unfairness?