And the other side of the coin: a happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for both dishonest individuals and parasitic "entrepreneurs". That's the primary reason welfare programs get so complicated very quickly - because the first to get to unconstrained free money are not those who that money was intended for; the first ones are the greedy bastards.

Combined with what you wrote, that's why I stopped believing there can be an efficient welfare program in our current system of things; we can at best try to minimize the total waste of bureaucracy and people cheating the system.

Actually that’s assumed in my depiction of such a system.

There is always going to be slacking/welfare advantage - that’s a given for me.

It’s sort of a system weakness. The side point is how much of this dead weight loss is there vs how much actual good is done.

In general there’s a lot of good that’s done in comparison to the good.

The point I’m making is hat politicians will always point to the dead weight loss because it has massive PR/optical appeal.

“Observe there the knave!”

It’s a matter of a systemic loss to one system, being an outsize gain to another program.

The trick is to avoid letting politicians get to a stage where such imagery has optical value.

This means a society which usually has enough for most people, no manipulation of relations to paint one group or the other as villains and a generally efficient enough govt that people don’t stop to say “this needs to end”.

It's true that some will cheat the system, and that has a cost. But there is also a cost associated with people going hungry, or being made homeless, or even dying due to their circumstances.

While the cost to those people may be infinite, the cost to everyone else may be less than the cost of doing something effective to help them. If you reduce things to economics you may not like the answers you get. Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.

> Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.

Does it? I thought it increased the costs due to lung cancer treatments.

Certainly the direct costs are huge, probably in the tens of billions of dollars or pounds per year. But it's quite possible that the shortened lifespan saves even more money by lowering spending on the chronic diseases of late life, etc.

<blockquote>However, smokers die some 10 years earlier than nonsmokers, according to the CDC, and those premature deaths provide a savings to Medicare, Social Security, private pensions and other programs.

Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi studied the net costs of smoking-related spending and savings and found that for every pack of cigarettes smoked, the country reaps a net cost savings of 32 cents.</blockquote>

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2009-04-smokers-society-money...

Maybe you should change your earlier statement to "smoking reduces public costs" or something else a little more inclusive. While there is good evidence smoking reduces costs when savings on retirement programs are considered it's less clear that it reduces health expenditures specifically.

Most people will get cancer or some terminal illness that requires expensive treatment eventually. And if they don't then they will live long enough to require assistive living which is also very expensive. Lung cancer is particularly aggressive and trends to kill people right before retirement age so the argument has been made that smoking reduces overall costs because you don't have to spend money on as many retired people who otherwise would need assistance.

That's the reason why I have my doubts about UBI. If it shows to work there will be people calling for cuts.

Yes. and arguments that UBI is too high, “see I can’t get any workers.”