So what we now have in many western nations is a huge bureaucratic body to prevent fraud on social security systems which at the same time significantly increase hurdles to apply for the programs and what can be done with the help. On the other hand, the bureaucratic support to fight tax evasion especially by the super rich, is typically tiny.
This is the Just world hypothesis in action.¹
Without that reading Candide is akin to reading a serial killers' torturous fan fiction.
The (modern) meaning of this is hard to discern without knowing if "poor" means the same in the two contexts. Is it not possible someone in the US who is considered to be "poor" (by wealth or QoL) might not be in Togo?
> bureaucratic support to fight tax evasion
Do you mean actual (legal) tax evasion, or tax fairness?
Many tax schemes exist in a weired gray area and have not been tested in court sufficiently, because of how complex they are, how difficult they are to invetigate and expensive to prosecute
That political discourse is easy to explain: while it is certainly helpful to "give the fish" to the starving one, it's less clear when you give the fish to "the idle" one instead of teaching him to fish.
The main difference is the meaning of "poor". The meaning of "poor" in Africa is someone that may eat once a day or not even that. In the west, the poverty line is way above that.
This reads like hyperbole and cynicism. Americans as a whole donate a large amount to charity each year and the United States already has wide-ranging social welfare programs. I challenge the use of the word "accidentally", because there are legitimate concerns about dependency, freeloading, and quite frankly, fairness. It is easy to declare that some population is being "underserved" but the funds for that service need to come from somewhere. Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?
The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments.
In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to hide the report under the guise of "national security".
I shudder to think how much money is being skimmed from the pentagon budget, but no one seems to care.
> Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?
Its not, but I find it disturbing how, in general, even the smallest whiff of fraud from a social program, brings all sorts of regulations and cuts. But the Pentagon making 65 trillion dollars in adjustments to its budget in 2 years is meet with silence.
For me, I would rather every single person in this country go to bed with a full stomach, even if it meant some amount of fraud, then to let the pentagon piss away more money.
If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon. Doing a proper audit of that would probably get back so much money any fraud in social programs would be statistically insignificant.
“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”
However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.
Not a fan of the amount the US spends on defense, but I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.
I'm with you but in this case the Pentagon hid the results of its first independent audit. There is no proof, but the fact they changed the rules to hide the results of the audit says all I need to know. If the pentagon wants to prove me wrong I'm all for it. Release the results and prove me wrong.
I won't hold my breath.
Personally, I am. And at large, just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex. The barriers to reducing military spending are different from the pressures put on politicians to manage social welfare programs.
That's not my experience, Can't tell you the amount of people I've meet that have no problem with the military having a blank check.
$11B is estimated to be fraud.
Your statement is quite trite to be honest.
89% of payments weren't considered fraudulent. I.e. it seems like you're suggesting that you'd rather sacrifice the well-being of the millions of people who received legitimate unemployment benefits just to prevent payments to a relatively small percentage of people who don't deserve them.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-25/californ...
So is a dollar you pay in taxes, ostensibly to help the poor but in reality it won't (see my post elsewhere in this thread on government bureaucracies). At least if you spend the dollar directly on a poor person, you know it's going directly to that poor person.
> Directly incentivizing against individual action
The only thing doing that is the government--by taking away our money in taxes, whether we agree with how it's spent or not, the government is preventing us from spending it on things we believe are justified, such as charity.
> continued failure -- which is exactly what we observe
We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor, by paying taxes, but most of that money doesn't actually help the poor. If people understood that either they have to help the poor directly or the poor won't get helped, you'd see many more people actually helping instead of punting it to the government in the mistaken belief that the government will take care of it.
> This is a collective problem
This is the excuse every collectivist uses to commandeer other people's resources and then squander them. Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself of helping the poor, so you'll outsource it to government bureaucrats. Who are even less motivated to actually help people than you are.
Nope.
My neighbor has to pay it too, and it's my neighbor that I'm bidding against for assets.
The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.
> We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor
Yes, my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.
> Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself
I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical. You know what sucks most about writing that big check to GiveWell every year? It's not the idea of devoting some of my work to a good cause -- that part feels good -- it's knowing that others won't, and that they will have an advantage over me as a result. Working harder for a good cause is one thing, getting a kick in the nuts on top of that is something else, defending the idea of rewarding charity with a kick in the nuts is something truly special, in the extra-chromosome sense of the word.
I believe that incentives matter, and I believe that fixing incentives is how we get out of this. We fix the incentives by making sure that everyone puts money into the pot.
No, you're not. You're bidding against the government and all of the contractors the government hires to do things. And the government can print money; you can't.
> The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.
Yes, and one of them is called "special interest politics". The way to overcome that through cooperation is for people to cooperatively agree to not give governments so much power.
> my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.
So basically, you don't think private charities, or at least churches, or at least churches like the one you grew up in, do a good job of helping people, based on your personal experience. Fair enough.
Next question: do you have personal experience with food stamp programs?
> I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical.
I'm not so sure, but let's assume for the sake of argument that you are. Then you have two choices:
(1) Since our country is a democracy, and since the majority of people don't actually want to help others (according to your hypothesis that we've accepted for the sake of argument), then you (and my wife and I, since we are atypical the same way you are) are outvoted. If the majority doesn't actually want to help people, their will should prevail and the government should stop doing it.
(2) If you want to argue that helping people is a good thing even if the majority doesn't want to do it, then you're admitting that you're willing to impose the will of a minority on the majority in a supposedly democratic country. In other words, you're basically saying that your will should prevail, on no other grounds than your personal opinion that helping people is a good thing.
Which do you pick?
Forcing people to contribute money in taxes is not "fixing incentives". It's just brute force.
The best way to increase people's incentive to help others would be to remove the illusion that they can outsource that task to the government.
Can you explain how those who work in government are less motivated to help others than those employed outside of government?
Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism, not democracy. We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.
Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!
No, it isn't, it's freedom. Your definition of "democracy" is basically that if a 50.1% majority feels like it, they can commandeer your resources as they see fit. That is tyranny, not democracy.
> We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.
If you think there are people who deserve help and are not being helped by existing organizations, you start an organization to help them. If a democratic majority agrees with you that those people deserve help and aren't getting it, you'll have no trouble getting donations.
> Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!
And if you think government-run programs actually do what the "democratically decided criteria" say they are supposed to do, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you. Anyone who has actually had to deal with these government-run programs (as my wife and I have for years, both on behalf of friends who are constantly getting the runaround from bureaucratic screw-ups and from my wife's experience as a social worker) will tell you that they are terrible at actually helping people.
You know neither tyranny or democracy.
A nation can just as easily 'accidentally help someone' to its own demise. What happens when you incentivize idleness on a national scale? What happens tax rates have to keep going up and up to fund the benefits of the idle? What about all the vast social welfare programs we already have in place here in America? What about the worker shortage that unemployment benefits caused just recently during the pandemic? A worker shortage I saw everywhere, first hand. Whatever country you're from, you're doing a bad job representing it.
This myth of the idle poor has to die. Poor people are overwhelmingly working, and the vast majority are working much harder than the upper middle class, and almost universally harder than the 0.01%.
Unfortunately, most poor people made the mistake to work on crucial jobs such as nursing, teaching small kids, cleaning up, maintaining infrastructure, building buildings and so on. All jobs that are not deemed inprotant enough to deserve a living wage.
Why "instead"? Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?
> Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?
You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.
The poster suggested that you take on the personal responsibility for righting what you perceive as an injustice in the world. I agree with them.
Anything else would be tyranny, as others have pointed out.
I suspect we live in different nations, then.
> You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.
Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.
""" The American republic was founded on a set of beliefs that were tested during the Revolutionary War. Among them was the idea that all people are created equal, whether European, Native American, or African American, and that these people have fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly. America’s revolutionaries openly discussed these concepts. Many Americans agreed with them but some found that the ideology was far more acceptable in the abstract than in practice. """ https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/foun...
> Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.
I am of the belief that taxes are appropriate to fund the limited function that the government was designed to fulfill. Namely goods/services which are public, such as providing national defense and a legal system for enforcing the number one principle, "voluntary transactions okay. Involuntary transactions not okay."
I am fine with taxes so long as they are providing a public good which cannot be met by the private sector due to factors such as nonexcludability. The types of things that are covered by that statement include things like national defense and law/policing such that the state can arbitrate on enforcement of private contracts as well as provide punishment for involuntary harm caused on a 3rd party.
In fact, that is the primary reason the founders were specific in direct vs. indirect taxes. Such a distinction provides clarity around how much of a public good can be created and how they can be paid for in a relatively fair fashion. Excise taxes are primarily consumption based, and all indirect taxes are subject to apportionment. Hence the absurdity of the 16th ammendment.
I do not consider wealth redistribution a function of the government, especially on the national level, as it is specifically excludable.
The company mentioned that found cash programs work, GiveDirectly, works not only on a global scale, but within US borders, with similar results.
However, they have had previous programs of their own that ran in the US, such as their Hurricane Harvey relief programs. (Which haven't turned into research papers).
The key difference is the complete lack of regulation and data policies. The potential for malevolence in a country the size of Togo is limited, but I'd rather not have the same processes in my own country.
The potential for building more advanced fraud protection systems also scales with the nation being discussed. Especially when you consider that the world's largest fraud protection experts are already operating within the borders of most of those richer nations.
Why not partner with MasterCard or VISA?
Because the problem domain is different for credit card transactions compared to covid stimulus?
Yet, somehow, the stimulus programs still require exorbitant amounts of their budget to verify known persons, and use this as a way to deny access to those who are most vulnerable.
Alternatively we could accept the role of outsourcing and the effects of the broken social fabric and the system-wide problems that remain unresolved in the anglosphere countries.
The richer you are the easier it is to justify pissing away resources inefficiently catering to stakeholders way down the totem pole.
Compare/contrast pretty much any publicly funded endeavor in the US/Canada/rich western Europe vs similar projects elsewhere. Sure the rich places get 10% more but they pay 90% more to do it.
And every time I say on HN that I can do something in a weekend, I get downvoted.
The US bureaucracies, federal and states, and the criss-cross between them, is extraordinarily large, complex and inefficient. The US Federal Government all by itself is a spending machine larger than Europe's biggest economy.
To pretend a system like Togo's could be implemented quickly in the US, one would have to pretend the US government system isn't presently constructed as it is. It would be necessary to invent an elaborate fantasy, where you start from a blank slate and have to deal with none of what presently exists.
Do you have any inside-information that this is true? Maybe there is a difference in cultural attitudes, but I'm sure there are lots of other differences too. Why is this the most important?
10 days from inception to rolled out. There was a slight hiccup with fraud, which was then handled almost instantly.
That kind of speed of development is absolutely possible, especially in richer nations. The key difference seems to be not the fraud prevention systems, but the desire to help those in need.
> “It’s a strong belief of mine that just because someone is poor doesn’t mean he’s irresponsible—he’s just poor,” she says. “So if you give him money, there’s no way he’s going to waste it. For me, it’s linked with dignity.”
That perspective isn't one you'll find popular in the nations that should be able to deploy programs like these, but don't. Their voters don't see them as helping the poor, and don't see the poor as likely to invest any protective income into survival. So the politician follows the culture of looking down on those with less, and perpetuates the cycle.
It's a self-inflicted cultural attack on the most vulnerable part of the population.
Who could be helped, in the space of weeks.