8 ms·

It's amazing how many people see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, and then turn around and claim that everything will be bett

• mordae 4y ago
  It's happening mostly because the politicians advocating for these dysfunctional policies are ignorants corrupted by their business friends who really don't want people to feel safe enough to ask for more money. At least here in Europe. Speaking from experience. We have several people directly profiting from several ineffective policies targeting disadvantaged in the local Parliament.
  • bitwize 4y ago
• xmprt 4y ago
  How would you solve this without the government? I can't see why private companies would be incentivized to do this. And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem.
  • tragictrash 4y ago
    I don't think people are arguing for no government assistance program, they're observing that it's incentivizing staying in the program rather than the assumed intended use, helping someone get on their feet again
  • mordae 4y ago
    Sometimes it's not even about budget. I've seen clerks actively discourage people from asking for the benefits even before the official evaluation.
  • daenz 4y ago
    >And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem. This pov is exactly what I was describing. It's always "more money will fix it." More control, more money, and then things will be better. I promise. Compulsive gamblers have a term for this: "chasing losses" >How would you solve this without the government? The problem of people with disabilities needing help? Do you believe people never received help before the government came along? They were helped at a local level by charitable people who cared about each other and knew that taking care of each other was part of a healthy society. Neither business nor government replaces that.
    • taurath 4y ago
      > Do you believe people never received help before the government came along? I do. Especially when people who need the help are from poor communities who can’t spare much - much less provide things like in home care, transportation, etc. If you say gov doesn’t need to be involved then please show me who is gonna help. The only ones I know of are the same that throw queer kids or male domestic abuse victims out on the street. People are more charitable when they’re rich (or more accurately, on rising incomes), but they only help out people close to them. Poor people are dehumanized. That’s why we need the gov. Or did you not like see the lines of cars 20 miles long during covid for food assistance?
      • daenz 4y ago
        Charitable programs in places of worship existed long before government programs. These are communities of people giving their time, money, and resources, and are actually invested in the people they are helping. If you don't believe they ever helped anyone, then we fundamentally disagree on historical facts.
        • mikeyouse 4y ago
          Literally nobody is disputing that charities in places of worship "ever helped anyone". What's in dispute is whether they would have sufficient resources and the will to help everyone. There are plenty of stories about religious programs refusing to help those outside of their religion which presents a pretty big problem if we're supposed to rely on them for universal charity. One recent story: https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-is-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-what-does-that-mean-if-youre-not-one https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-i...
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    Welfare policies don't have to be stupid, now do they?
• jjoonathan 4y ago
  This is the one-two punch that Republicans use to kill social programs. 1. Drag their feet until Democrats reluctantly agree to include something guaranteed to cause dysfunction (uneconomic means testing, perverse incentive cliffs, adverse selection, etc). 2. Point at the dysfunction they created as a reason to kill the program. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to #2 if I didn't see so much #1.
  • myfavoritedog 4y ago
    And yet, when the Democrats control Congress and the presidency (like they do now, like they did in 2010), they do absolutely nothing to show us how wonderful their programs could be -- if only they had control! Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.
    • praxulus 4y ago
      They don't actually have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support though. Outside of budget reconciliation, neither party has had the power to pass legislation without at least some bipartisan support since Ted Kennedy was replaced in 2010.
      • leereeves 4y ago
        They do have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support, actually. They can pass a separate bill to suspend the filibuster on another bill, and suspending the filibuster only requires the 50 Democrat Senators and the VP. They tried to do so in January but Manchin and Sinema voted against it.
        • klyrs 4y ago
          So, they don't have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support. They'd need to change the rules to have that ability.
          • 4y ago
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  These kind of labyrinthine policies happen because they're attempts to appease people who don't want these programs to exist at all.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yup. People complain about freeloaders taking advantage of these systems so they demand policies like this.
    • olyjohn 4y ago
      Yep. Shut down the whole system because there are some people who might cheat on it. It's like if we shut down Home Depot because there's people stealing merchandise. Welp, buncha fuckin freeloaders stealing tools again! Better get rid of all the Home Depots so nobody can steal.
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
        And even if people aren't cheating it, just make up stories about people doing to so to justify shutting it down! The "welfare queen" archetype is so strong in the minds of people in this country that it prevents all sorts of useful policy.
• Swenrekcah 4y ago
  Well, it is the government that’s providing the help in the first place. They just need to fix the qualifications at the margin, but that is often met with hostility from other voters for the misguided reason that people are just leeching off these programs, when the reality is exactly what is described, that the paperwork and punishment for extra earning is exactly what makes that happen, to the extents that it does. For the record I absolutely don’t want the government handling everything, I’m just tired of hearing that everything the government does is disfunctional and everything private enterprise does is great and noble, cause it’s not true.
• dwallin 4y ago
  It’s amazing how people could see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, then go around insisting we add more means testing to benefits because it would be horrible if people got help who “didn’t deserve it”. Just a hint, the people causing this dysfunctional state of affairs are probably not the ones who are trying to expand government benefits to cover as many people as possible.
  • mcavoybn 4y ago
    Very snarky response. I think the poster you replied to was trying to point out that the reason this happens is because the government prints money and if they don't take the money out of circulation via taxes then inflation becomes an issue.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• guelo 4y ago
  It's the politicians with your antigovernment attitude that make these programs so awful. Then they turn around and point at the mess they helped create as the reason they're antigovernment.
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    It’s easy to pass blame; harder to realize that we are the people who are supposed to fix it.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  “For decades most airplane crashes have been caused by trained pilots and yet we continue to put trained pilots in the cockpit.” This form of argument almost looks compelling until you realize that it is predicated on some unspoken belief that there is a clear better alternative.
• excitom 4y ago
  It's not the fault of government per se, but puritanical conservatives in government who think any assistance to disadvantaged people is coddling lazy slackers. See for example, drug testing of assistance recipients. It turns out, as the testing has proven, that most of the people who get a little bit of cash are most likely to use it on food and essentials. Oh, and the people who run the for-profit drug testing happen to be cronies of the politicians who advocated for the testing - such a surprise. Another example: Don't let people withdraw all their money at once or they will waste it. Instead give them debit cards with a small withdrawal limit. Oh, and there's a withdrawal fee that eats into the meager cash ... and cronies of the politicians who advocated for the policy own the ATMs in the stores which collect those fees.
  • montjoy 4y ago
    As I get older I see more and more of “reducing gov’t waste” as a means to funnel money into private individuals’ pockets. See also for-profit prisons, charter schools, bussing, medical care, etc etc.
• UncleMeat 4y ago
  The alternative is worse. My aunt is on disability. Yes, systems suck and if she could hold a temp job she'd be discouraged from doing so. She'd be dead in the ground if conservative policies ran everything.
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Sounds like you are pro-immortality!
• amelius 4y ago
  Do economists and politologist not acknowledge the problem?
• philistine 4y ago
  We want to help people who don’t make a lot of money. Governments are imperfect institutions yes, but what alternative is there to send money to people who need it ?
• mcculley 4y ago
  And yet, some countries and cultures have safety nets that work. It is not surprising that the government functions like the people that elected it. If your community is comprised of assholes, you get cruel policies.
  • masklinn 4y ago
    > And yet, some countries and cultures have safety nets that work. Welfare traps are definitely a thing in countries and cultures with “safety nets that works”, fwiw.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Aren't most of these absurd rules the result of elected legislators putting on a show for their voters rather than the result of professional beurocrats making arbitrary rules because they felt like it?