Get a homeless person an apartment? Great.
But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making money and took most of your earnings away to pay for the housing. The program constantly threatened to take away your funding if the paperwork wasn't perfect. The program constantly made mistakes, paid rent late, and generally threatened a vulnerable homeless person with further homelessness.
It was infuriating to experience this through another person. In attempts to help a person, these programs were taking vulnerable people, dangling housing in front of them, and constantly threatening them with taking it away. That is of course exactly the opposite of what you need to do to someone having trouble taking care of themselves, and sadly mirrors the abusive kinds of situation which so often leads people to homelessness.
There are two issues with this:
- "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population needs government assistance
- "welfare queens" is largely a fiction -- the story comes from Linda Taylor[0], a woman who cheated the welfare system, but was caught, tried, and served prison time for her fraud. In other words, the system worked, but anyone relying on government assistance should be punished for it.
The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services).
In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.
Of course it seems hard to separate "the hiring manager wants to work with them [because they are a great vendor]" from "the hiring manager wants to work with them because they pay for the hiring manager's kids' school and family vacation" without adequate documentation.
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.
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.
This is what most people do anyway. So, what's the problem?
>"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.)"
It is my opinion that those are examples of vanity projects which provide little benefit to others, which is why I said:
>>"Your comment actually illustrates one thing I find repulsive about basic income proposals..."
I never said that this was true for any and all people, or that:
>>>"[I] just don't like what you think people would do with their time, if given the chance because they're not chained to a job"
For them to be vanity, one's work would have to actually be deeply associated with one's identity so that one could look good in the eyes of others. In fact, 99.9% of people using that data will not know or care who originally contributed it, and editing these resources is about as thankless a task as can be.
Work-for-pay tends to be more beneficial to others than 'creative expression'-type activities such as writing, painting, or composing music. The vast majority of what people create is worthless to others, whereas much of what people do 'for work' is actually useful to others.
I’ve occasionally edited Wikipedia, to correct grammatical or factual errors, but I don’t see it as having contributed much to the world.
This not liking vanity thing is interesting but if you tie it to economics then anything that helps people that doesn't make money --things like free software and participating in charities-- could be considered 'vanity' too despite the good they can do.
I got similarly worked up over 'virtue signaling' and people only doing good things for personal prestige when I was an angsty teen but later realised it was better to believe that some people want to do good things sometimes because reasons.
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"?
$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
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.
I’m a big fan of having a robust social welfare system, but we need to acknowledge realities that maybe we don’t prefer to acknowledge. Many people on welfare are idle don’t do anything meaningful with their time. The response to that isn’t necessarily to cut welfare. It could mean taking a bigger picture look at society to see how changes have affected peoples’ abilities to have meaningful lives and civic engagement without work.
Do you have a citation for this claim? My understanding is that enormous numbers of welfare recipients are elderly, frail, or have chronic medical issues.
I would like to learn more about the issue. Do you have any references handy?
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.
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.
Most proposals for UBI I've seen are truly universal, meaning that rich and poor alike are entitled to 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.
Usually this is "solved" via "aligning incentives". [1] But as we all know from James Cameron's documentaries as he followed the Connors, it's not that easy to notice when things go awry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... [1] https://intelligence.org/research/
This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because the state allows it.
But so what?
The goal of a program should be effectively improving the functioning of society. That can still be a real outcome even if there are people who choose to be less productive so they can obtain benefits.
So what? Neither is right, generally. The political discussion about social programs needs to be about how to maximize their effectiveness, not to be about this existential struggle between two sides who both deny reality.
The concept might be foreign to most HNers, but lots of people lack entrepreneurial spirit, they instead attempt to minimize pain in their lives.
As long as it's sustainable, why worry? Do we want to drag people into productivity or just let them live their own lives?
I think it's inefficient to do the former.
I think this is the perfect outcome for the type of person who wants to live their life that way because the alternative, working somewhere, means they will be the worst coworker or employee you have ever had. They'll do just enough to not be fired and never enough to actually be worth their paycheck, walking the line and wasting resources that could be spent elsewhere. I've worked with this person and they destroy team morale and productivity without even trying, they're not bad people and I harbor no ill-will towards them, they just don't want to be there and have very few other options in our society.
While I think we must take care not to create too much of incentive for this lifestyle, I will happily pay money out of my paycheck to not have to work with those that prefer it.
Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare?
These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse.
If you want more people to work, push for higher wages. If you want people to be capable of working for less money, ensure that childcare, public transportation, and healthcare are subsidized enough to make those wages livable.
They had ample opportunity to work, were technically skilled in a desirable field, and had a job in that field for some time.
There wasn't a mitigating circumstance outside of not wanting to work very much. If you have your housing set up for you, the state pays your healthcare and gives you food assistance, and you like cooking simple meals for yourself... well you don't actually need money for all that much.
It wasn't a matter of earning a poverty wage or not, it was a matter of earning a middle class wage or not. They chose not because they figured out how to do so and live the life they wanted.
There were social media posts boasting about this.
I ask because my family member tries something similar, but it only really works because I pay for their housing. It just doesn't seem possible to live on $350/mo otherwise.
And I could point to social media posts admitting to this strategy to take advantage of these support programs, but I wouldn’t.
Indeed. I also suspect "wrong people" is a slightly quieter dog whistle/code word for you know, "those people".
I also wonder how the welfare cheater statictic compares to the disability cheater statistic. I'd even wager disability is far more abused than welfare by ablebodied workers who make good money and have homes.
Now imagine if we used the same "wrong person" argument against disability and watch the same people who would vote against welfare vote in favor of disability because they might be affected.
prioritization in vaccination at the cost of incredible inneficiency is celebrated by the media and our political class. I'm not so upset about the cost as much as the delays it causes to herd immunity. which is presumably what this vaccination program is all about.
My sister in law applied for need-based financial aid at a flagship state school. It was so complicated that my wife and I (both corporate attorneys) had to jump on a Zoom call with her and the financial aid office to help sort things out. I can't imagine having to go through all those hoops for housing, etc.
This is a critically pressing problem with Medicaid. The majority of uninsured people in the country are eligible for free insurance under Medicaid, an ACA Bronze plan, or at least subsidies under the ACA: https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/millions-of-uninsured-ameri.... Everyone who files a tax return showing income under the threshold should be automatically registered in Medicaid.
Fraud does happen. But it doesn't happen enough for it to be worth setting up an entire bureaucracy to prevent it. Especially if that bureaucracy undermines the value of the program for everyone who's faithfully making use of the services in the intended manner.
More and more, it seems that keeping social welfare programs inefficient is benefiting the people who want to remove them entirely (in favor of lowering taxes).
But perhaps it would happen vastly more if that bureaucracy wasn't trying to prevent? I don't know, but I suspect there are an awful lot of people who would commit fraud if they thought they'd get away with it.
Accept that some people getting help will need it less than others.
There's "fraud" and then there's homeless people trying to get their lives on track. People who need help and support. Saddling them with complex frequent requirements and then calling failing to meet them "fraud" is not helping people.
Be interested in helping people instead of helping only the "right" people.
It's simpler just to give every citizen the same amount of money than to have to deal with all the edge cases of people having different income this year (and needing the money immediately) versus last year. If you get hit by a bus on January 1st, I'd hope that the money was available for you right away, not in another year.
Additionally, I'd like to see a "rolling average" approach to taxation. I think it's enormously unfair that someone who has a one time event (like making a million dollar commission on a sale they worked on for five years) is taxed massively more, and misses out on many more tax credits, than someone who makes $200K a year for five years.
However, from a society-level view, how much value do we get from the X spent in prevention? We're funneling money to a specific goal, so some verification is needed. But the more we verify, the more man-hours we spend on filling out and checking the paperwork. None of that work benefits society. Those people could've been doing other jobs that perform useful services. And it's not like the money going to fraudsters vanishes. At least it goes back into the economy. We should require only enough to make sure we achieve the program's goals within budget.
Figuring that out is the hard part. Hopefully smart minds have been tackling this.
Actually no, at least 40 billion went to a Nigerian scammer group. That’s a national security issue and overrides concerns about charity and equity. It’s an existential threat.
(I mean entirely, because if there are people living comfortably on the program without no motivation to do anything else in their life, then a) maybe that's okay, b) maybe that's a mental health issue [and fixing it might cost a lot more], c) at some point the fraud becomes so encompassing, that it's not the program's fault, but it's someone literally robbing taxpayers via whatever means they can. Furthermore any social program that only addresses and takes into account some narrow slice of people's life problems will be easily gameable, so let's have comprehensive integrated programs. Yes, they are hard, but it's not like putting people on the moon is that much easier.)
And also make markets freer. The amount of rent-seeking behavior around programs like WIC is just staggering. And it serves the interests of neither WIC recipients nor the general public; it's only there because pearl-clutching is easy to co-opt for financial gain.
who cares, on the face of it, what size the government is? size is not the goal, it's at best a poor proxy metric for (in-)efficiency, which itself is a proxy metric for how much we help people via public goods (and thereby the whole economy).
rent-seeking around wic is a rounding error next to property & capital rent-seeking overall. moreover, the right place to place blame (and seek redress) is with the rent-seekers themselves, not the assistance recipients (or the associated governmental programs) being exploited by them.
Perhaps framing things in classical liberal terms feels like de-centering assistance recipients. I get that, but I'm not sure that's actually a bad thing, in this case. I can't imagine your average WIC participant actually wants to live under a microscope, regardless of the political leanings of the person who's looking through it.
It's an example of how pearl-clutching attitudes - in this case, fears, based on deeply entrenched moralistic notions about less-wealthy people's ability to make decisions for themselves, that people might buy the wrong food - are easy to co-opt for mercenary purposes, to basically nobody's benefit.
And it's also looking at the finger rather than where it's pointing. I could just as easily have picked on health care, for example, or housing assistance programs. But I'm not trying to write a book, here.
I think the more interesting phenomenon here is that seeing the negative consequences of a largely fiscally conservative cause is bringing fiscal conservative thought leaders to the point of putting their support behind a traditionally socialist cause.
So only reason to give them food stamps instead of just giving them money is to feed money into grocery stores and to create government bureaucracy jobs. If you scrapped the entire program and just gave people money poor people would be healthier, the government would be leaner and the poorer would have more money to spend on stuff they need.
Until the size stops correlating with the amount of resources that must be taken from people everybody with anything to their name cares.
The goal posts aren't there. If a certain number of students fail it creates red flags for the district and if those students are a certain minority that can viewed as evidence of institutional racism and open up legal liabilities as such the districts are highly motivated to pass everyone along but to not to make the good and willing better.
Meanwhile, the kids at the bottom get left behind.
I turned out relatively fine but I would rank my time in the "gifted" program as an active harm to that from what I remember.
They will be better educated, have more economic opportunities, more financial support from society, and be more well connected.
Meritocratic programs exacerbate inequality and grow the divide between the kids at the top and those at the bottom.
Maybe we shouldn't stop doing them, but we need to think about supporting the bottom, such as free lunch, without exception.
Free lunch doesn't do that. full bellies learn better, but if mom/dad have a "who cares" attitude, that is very likely to flow down to kids.
I also acknowledge the challenge of getting people to care. Its no easy feat.
https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-are-tests-biased-agains...
(Separating children into deserving and undeserving categories of educational attention seems that way to me...)
In today's school system, the resources go to those who do not desire an education. This is because of programs like "no child left behind", and because a higher graduation rate looks better. But I think we should make a normative judgement that those who do not make an effort to better themselves should receive no support from society. Put less money into summer schools for kids who fail, and put more money into before- and after-school tutoring. This will benefit those who put in the effort to the detriment of those who don't care, which is a good trade-off.
Why can't we have summer schools and before/after-school tutoring?
that can be said enough!
In theory I sympathize with the sentiment, but 1) the dole is not wealth 2) the administration costs of the dole don't make money disappear, its just routed into income for the admin workers, 3) the administration costs of the dole do not necessarily decrease with UBI and might increase given a larger population to administer.
I generally do not support UBI since the key problem isn't cash in people's pockets, it is lack of engagement with society in ways that add value. UBI papers over the core problem.
There are two sets of rules in this world.
https://abc7news.com/california-edd-unemployment-fraud-ca-sc...
$30 billion in unemployment fraud in just a year, in just one state.
It's identity fraud. (Entirely because of the tragic state of US [and global] privacy and state-citizen communication culture.)
It's not people taking advantage of welfare and deciding to not look for work. It's career criminals.
If the system is fine except in situations like a once a century global pandemic that throws way more people out of work than normally happens even in most recessions and throws them out of work for longer than is normal where it jumps to a fraud rate of 30% or so (and presumably returns to normal when the pandemic is over), I'm OK with that.
If the "undeserving" argument were true, there wouldn't be talk about increasing eligibility to the prison population, especially given their low mortality rates compared to 65+
Once people start viewing the system as inherently unfair, then it can start to fall apart pretty quickly.
Not saying that the vaccine situation in the article is an example of an unfair situation.
> Last week a local vaccine site had extra doses nearing the end of the day and word spread. Ultimately, they put them in the arms of whoever could get there in time.
> I personally know two unrelated people who raced there and got vaccinated, despite not meeting the criteria mentioned in the article. The only criteria that mattered in this instance were being present and being willing.
> This was also in Houston and at an “official” site. I attempted to get similarly lucky at the same site the next day by visiting at closing time. The worker that turned me away told me that because of complaints from those who missed out the day before, they were told to no longer accept walk-ins. I’m content to wait my turn, but that experience combined with this persecution story...I have to wonder how many doses are going to waste in my community.
solving 1 does not automatically solve 2. the slider between anarchocapitalism and state-owned and -operated socialism belongs somewhere in the middle and everyone wants to tug it into a different spot.
if theres anything the internet + social media is teaching us, its that the public has a very, very bad habit of watching one 15 second video of anecdata and vigorously extrapolating, thinking they have arrived at actual data.
all it would take is a couple tweets about some homeless asshole partying in his free government house with his foodstamp money to upset 2 and overthrow 1, even if it was the best solution on the spreadsheet.