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Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It make
by add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
- ryandrake 11mo agoDon't forget: When they help billionaires and trillion dollar business, it's framed as driving prosperity and stimulating the economy.
- watwut 11mo agoMaybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.
- macintux 11mo agoIt turns out that the promise to hurt other people more is a winning strategy.
- zeroonetwothree 11mo agoTurns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors. Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.
- loeg 11mo agoNeither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
- macintux 11mo agoDon't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
- terminalshort 11mo agoHave you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?
- macintux 11mo agoI would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits. With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
- zeroonetwothree 11mo agoThere’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
- terminalshort 11mo agoBut you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work. Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
- Braxton1980 11mo agoThat $200billion means about 17% fraud in a program with minimal checks
- coryrc 11mo agoWashington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
- Braxton1980 11mo agoOnly one political party rallies against "government handouts" and blames the individual for their problems. Why would you generalize your opinion to all when this is extremely clear? How can things get better if you can't even be bothered to criticize at a granular level? Since we are a Democracy this matters.
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo agoA mentor once told me that telling people something is much less effective than leading them to realize it themselves. Of course you're right, but spelling it out explicitly leads to a partisan flame ware.