10 ms·

Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (

Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US military was actively drawing down). She basically said that the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of money, but both had potential for her to eventually be promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow it. Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.

bee_rider 2y ago
I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).
willcipriano 2y ago
Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
- jrmg 2y ago
  Could have worked under the table. This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!
  - OvidNaso 2y ago
    Illegaling working as a daycare no less!
  - QuarterReptile 2y ago
    Yes, I believe that is correct. I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".
- genrilz 2y ago
  I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?
  - Kamq 2y ago
    > I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions. You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.
harimau777 2y ago
I've heard negative income taxes suggested as an alternative to our current approach. I'm not an expert on them, but it might be worth looking into for people who are interested in ideas for improving our system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
- smileysteve 2y ago
  Re-introducing progressive tax rates would be a small start; Though, allegedly, a majority of Americans don't comprehend progressive tax rates. Many state income taxes reach the top income tax rate before the federal poverty rate (ie < $12k). The federal tax rates are poorly graduated; the first, 10% rate, cuts at $11,600 over to 12%; and then we jump 10% to 22%, only for the next bracket to have only 2% bracket gap again. Imagine if the first bracket was 0% and went all of the way to welfare levels - approximately $30k, the US could effectively eliminate the additional complication of the Standard Deduction (also a paint point of illegal filing and fraud). Imagine if every bracket was easily defined at ~10% - that could make predicting and filing easier. This is addition to payroll taxes being flat and regressive - when they could be built into the income tax.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    2024 tax brackets Tax rate Single filers Married couples filing jointly Married couples filing separately Head of household 10% $11,600 or less $23,200 or less $11,600 or less $16,550 or less 12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300 $11,601 to $47,150 $16,551 to $63,100 22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050 $47,151 to $100,525 $63,101 to $100,500 24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900 $100,526 to $191,150 $100,501 to $191,150 32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450 $191,151 to $243,725 $191,151 to $243,700 35% $243,726 to $609,350 $487,451 to $731,200 $243,276 to $365,600 $243,701 to $609,350 37% $609,351 or more $731,201 or more $365,601 or more $609,351 or more I'm confused. These look progressive to me. Can you explain?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
highcountess 2y ago
Ignoring all the fallacies, you are correct about one thing; the recipients are of course not the problem, the problem are the proponents of such nonsensical, fantastical, infantile, and even outright immoral and unethical concepts like UBI or even welfare. All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror. Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.
milesskorpen 2y ago
In this specific experiment, people earned $0.20 less for every $1 they were given mainly due to working fewer hours. Those hours were primarily shifted to leisure. (This is not a value statement, just what the study found.)
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  yeah clearly nobody on this thread read the findings
fdr 2y ago
You are looking for the term "effective marginal tax rate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid. The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum. This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.
- namibj 2y ago
  Under that concept, well, if actually taking the social security (Grundsicherung) in Germany as a given, even assuming low CoL situations (it's worse in higher-CoL situations), the effective average tax rate past like about 160 EUR/month of income will rise to a peak at around 1500 EUR/month income and then continuously decrease to the super wealthy limit tax just under 50%. At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage). When the effective marginal tax rate is high, this is often as close as makes no difference, because you not only have the cost of bureaucracy but also the cost of working. You're paying an effective marginal tax rate of 80% so nominally you get to keep 20% of your income and have the incentive to work, but working requires you to commute, so you have to buy transit tickets or maintain a vehicle. And because you're now spending your day working, you can't use that time to prepare food or maintain your household, so you may have to pay someone else to do some of those things -- but their entire compensation has to come out of the 20% of your pay you actually get to spend, so this can easily eat the entire thing and make you better off to not take the job.
WheatMillington 2y ago
You call it a myth and then describe the very real disincentive to work, in detail.
Dylan16807 2y ago
> Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.
_the_inflator 2y ago
Some would argue she was over-compensating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology)
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I'm retired. I saved enough to live comfortably -not richly. I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated). I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process. So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.
- tacocataco 2y ago
  Those employers are used to having economic coercion to push people into their arms. They cannot fathom treating their employees with respect. Their employees are tools to be used, abused, and discarded. Human resources.
ziggyzecat 2y ago
the woman is correct in blaming the system. she understands that the disincentive comes from a systemic failure and deliberate misrepresentation/misconception. even @geohot said in some interview he'd rather die than receive UBI while his face and body language radiated 'LIAR'. let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free. she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher. students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.
lawlessone 2y ago
have spent some time on jobseekers benefit a few years ago. It's soul crushing and you get just enough to get by, and i'm in country where the benefits are kinda ok. always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering. This last part is just my opinion: Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ixwt 2y ago
There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves. This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves. Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
- Majromax 2y ago
  > Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table). That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end. In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
  - jewayne 2y ago
    > In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes. Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
    - 2y ago
david38 2y ago
To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare. The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work. Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  This isn’t a problem really with welfare, but a problem with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible. In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.
  - DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
    Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone holding an elected or decisive office these days. The will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper, freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS AFTER ALL!!1!
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      My elected representatives seem to understand this pretty well. The problem is that people keep electing other people who view anyone not working as leeches. Often the difference between keeping those elected officials and electing someone that represents you is a few hundred or a few thousand people deciding that their vote does matter after all and going and casting it. It's about the population of a rural village or small town. I don't know how we're going to get back to our golden age, but I know that we need to find the motivation somehow.
  - 2y ago
bko 2y ago
Yes, exactly. If you pay someone not to work, I can't blame them for not working. Sure it could be short-sighted, but that's not a moral flaw. The system is designed to keep people in poverty and dependent on the system. It's really tragic
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Incentives can be even worse than that if you punish people for working (e.g. take away more benefits than their income increases.)
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  If your kids have to live on the street if you take that part-time job, it's not only short-sighted to stay on welfare, it's the rational thing to do even in the long term.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Even more rational is finding an unofficial source of income, which is what people in this situation often do. At scale, this may create a wrong impression that levels of welfare are adequate to guarantee the basics.
    - xp84 2y ago
      Yes, and worse, the incidents of unreported income like that also create a narrative to be spoon-fed to the public, that “welfare cheats” are taking advantage of everybody’s goodwill. I’m sure it actually happens. Everything gets abused by some. But people who are doing what you describe are usually not doing it out of greed, but to work around that broken system.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
This is alternatively referred to as the welfare cliff [1] Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits. https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the-welfare-cliff-how-the-benefit-scale-discourages-work#:~:text=The%20dramatic%20rise%20in%20welfare,especially%20true%20for%20workers%20near https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the... edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.png https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...
- ilya_m 2y ago
  What is the link to the Chicago study?
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    oops, Added

bee_rider 2y ago

I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).

willcipriano 2y ago

Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

jrmg 2y ago
Could have worked under the table. This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!
- OvidNaso 2y ago
  Illegaling working as a daycare no less!
- QuarterReptile 2y ago
  Yes, I believe that is correct. I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.
margalabargala 2y ago
If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".
genrilz 2y ago
I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?
- Kamq 2y ago
  > I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions. You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.

harimau777 2y ago

I've heard negative income taxes suggested as an alternative to our current approach. I'm not an expert on them, but it might be worth looking into for people who are interested in ideas for improving our system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

smileysteve 2y ago
Re-introducing progressive tax rates would be a small start; Though, allegedly, a majority of Americans don't comprehend progressive tax rates. Many state income taxes reach the top income tax rate before the federal poverty rate (ie < $12k). The federal tax rates are poorly graduated; the first, 10% rate, cuts at $11,600 over to 12%; and then we jump 10% to 22%, only for the next bracket to have only 2% bracket gap again. Imagine if the first bracket was 0% and went all of the way to welfare levels - approximately $30k, the US could effectively eliminate the additional complication of the Standard Deduction (also a paint point of illegal filing and fraud). Imagine if every bracket was easily defined at ~10% - that could make predicting and filing easier. This is addition to payroll taxes being flat and regressive - when they could be built into the income tax.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  2024 tax brackets Tax rate Single filers Married couples filing jointly Married couples filing separately Head of household 10% $11,600 or less $23,200 or less $11,600 or less $16,550 or less 12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300 $11,601 to $47,150 $16,551 to $63,100 22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050 $47,151 to $100,525 $63,101 to $100,500 24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900 $100,526 to $191,150 $100,501 to $191,150 32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450 $191,151 to $243,725 $191,151 to $243,700 35% $243,726 to $609,350 $487,451 to $731,200 $243,276 to $365,600 $243,701 to $609,350 37% $609,351 or more $731,201 or more $365,601 or more $609,351 or more I'm confused. These look progressive to me. Can you explain?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

highcountess 2y ago

Ignoring all the fallacies, you are correct about one thing; the recipients are of course not the problem, the problem are the proponents of such nonsensical, fantastical, infantile, and even outright immoral and unethical concepts like UBI or even welfare. All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror. Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.

milesskorpen 2y ago

In this specific experiment, people earned $0.20 less for every $1 they were given mainly due to working fewer hours. Those hours were primarily shifted to leisure. (This is not a value statement, just what the study found.)

whimsicalism 2y ago
yeah clearly nobody on this thread read the findings

fdr 2y ago

You are looking for the term "effective marginal tax rate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid. The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum. This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.

namibj 2y ago
Under that concept, well, if actually taking the social security (Grundsicherung) in Germany as a given, even assuming low CoL situations (it's worse in higher-CoL situations), the effective average tax rate past like about 160 EUR/month of income will rise to a peak at around 1500 EUR/month income and then continuously decrease to the super wealthy limit tax just under 50%. At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage). When the effective marginal tax rate is high, this is often as close as makes no difference, because you not only have the cost of bureaucracy but also the cost of working. You're paying an effective marginal tax rate of 80% so nominally you get to keep 20% of your income and have the incentive to work, but working requires you to commute, so you have to buy transit tickets or maintain a vehicle. And because you're now spending your day working, you can't use that time to prepare food or maintain your household, so you may have to pay someone else to do some of those things -- but their entire compensation has to come out of the 20% of your pay you actually get to spend, so this can easily eat the entire thing and make you better off to not take the job.

WheatMillington 2y ago

You call it a myth and then describe the very real disincentive to work, in detail.

Dylan16807 2y ago

> Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.

_the_inflator 2y ago

Some would argue she was over-compensating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology)

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I'm retired. I saved enough to live comfortably -not richly. I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated). I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process. So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.

tacocataco 2y ago
Those employers are used to having economic coercion to push people into their arms. They cannot fathom treating their employees with respect. Their employees are tools to be used, abused, and discarded. Human resources.

ziggyzecat 2y ago

the woman is correct in blaming the system. she understands that the disincentive comes from a systemic failure and deliberate misrepresentation/misconception. even @geohot said in some interview he'd rather die than receive UBI while his face and body language radiated 'LIAR'. let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free. she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher. students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.

lawlessone 2y ago

have spent some time on jobseekers benefit a few years ago. It's soul crushing and you get just enough to get by, and i'm in country where the benefits are kinda ok. always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering. This last part is just my opinion: Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ixwt 2y ago

There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves. This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves. Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).

Majromax 2y ago
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table). That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end. In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
- jewayne 2y ago
  > In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes. Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
  - 2y ago

david38 2y ago

To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare. The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work. Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.

bee_rider 2y ago
This isn’t a problem really with welfare, but a problem with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible. In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone holding an elected or decisive office these days. The will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper, freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS AFTER ALL!!1!
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    My elected representatives seem to understand this pretty well. The problem is that people keep electing other people who view anyone not working as leeches. Often the difference between keeping those elected officials and electing someone that represents you is a few hundred or a few thousand people deciding that their vote does matter after all and going and casting it. It's about the population of a rural village or small town. I don't know how we're going to get back to our golden age, but I know that we need to find the motivation somehow.
- 2y ago

bko 2y ago

Yes, exactly. If you pay someone not to work, I can't blame them for not working. Sure it could be short-sighted, but that's not a moral flaw. The system is designed to keep people in poverty and dependent on the system. It's really tragic

s1artibartfast 2y ago
Incentives can be even worse than that if you punish people for working (e.g. take away more benefits than their income increases.)
actionfromafar 2y ago
If your kids have to live on the street if you take that part-time job, it's not only short-sighted to stay on welfare, it's the rational thing to do even in the long term.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Even more rational is finding an unofficial source of income, which is what people in this situation often do. At scale, this may create a wrong impression that levels of welfare are adequate to guarantee the basics.
  - xp84 2y ago
    Yes, and worse, the incidents of unreported income like that also create a narrative to be spoon-fed to the public, that “welfare cheats” are taking advantage of everybody’s goodwill. I’m sure it actually happens. Everything gets abused by some. But people who are doing what you describe are usually not doing it out of greed, but to work around that broken system.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

This is alternatively referred to as the welfare cliff [1] Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits. https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the-welfare-cliff-how-the-benefit-scale-discourages-work#:~:text=The%20dramatic%20rise%20in%20welfare,especially%20true%20for%20workers%20near https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the... edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.png https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...

ilya_m 2y ago
What is the link to the Chicago study?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  oops, Added