It’s ironic. In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to, but they will happily waste millions of dollars paying someone to do a shitty job.
Tangent: during my last stint on unemployment, there was this class we were required to attend. In that class, they repeatedly told us that we are not entitled to unemployment benefits. They didn't exactly offer an alternative vocabulary.
It certainly fits the government's definition of an entitlement[1].
It's also structured as a non-optional, government-ran insurance scheme predominantly funded through explicit payroll tax obligations[2], which employers aren't entitled to opt out of.
As long as you meet your states particular flavor of requirements, you're entitled to your unemployment insurance benefits. Despite any statements to the contrary states may push in their mandatory unemployment class.
That's absurd. They take it out of your paycheck every month, it's paid entirely from employee wages, it can't be spent on anything but unemployment, and you get benefits proportional to what you contributed. It's literally your own money that they're giving back to you that they took for the sole purpose of forcing you to save money for if you lose your job at some point. It's like if I asked to borrow a pen, then when you asked for it back pretending like it was some benevolent gift.
It's definitely not a line item on paychecks in my state. It's structured as an insurance premium paid by companies to the state. The company's premiums increase when there's a claim against the "policy." Smaller companies like to try denying claims in an attempt to prevent this increase.
One could certainly argue that if this 'premium' didn't exist, it could be paid out in salaries.
That's right, I recall something like that. I think states administer their own unemployment system even though it's mandated by the federal government. It's a payroll tax where I live. It's calculated based on your wages and paid based on the amount of insurance you've funded regardless of whether the regulations/company decides to display it on the calculation or not. It might also get buried under something like "state and local taxes," too.
Unemployment costs are handled by the employer. It is the State Unemployment Insurance (SUI) tax. All employers are experience rated based on age, number of claims, and win/loss rates in claim protests. It is not taken out of employee paychecks.
Your link doesn't support your claim. The article indicates a crime syndicate was responsible, a group who had already stolen lots of money. The weakness here is not in a UBI-type system at all; money was being stolen regardless of the source.
> The fraudsters took advantage of states that were already struggling to process a flood of jobless claims amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related government shutdowns.
To me, this reads as a negative mark against the US federal government for denying the existence of the threat. Not a result of the aide programs themselves.
> In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might receive more unemployment than they are entitled to,
There isn’t an infinite amount of unemployment money available. If you allow fraud to run rampant in these systems, there is less money available for those who actually need it.
Enforcing rules and regulations is a good thing for everyone.
Furthermore, many people are earning more on the current USA unemployment system than they did from their original jobs. The system was designed to overpay some people for the sake of quickly delivering the system. (Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett... )
It's embedded in the human psyche. Thousands a day will step over a street beggar to begrudgingly buy a barely palatable coffee from the kiosk they're sitting beside.
Who is "they"? I don't think anyone but corrupt politicians and their cronies are happy about wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Certainly not the taxpayers.
If the government hired developers directly and promoted those developers to levels of seniority, it would in fact spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently than outsourcing to shitty consultants and contractors whose primary goal is to keep the same zombie contract going year after year.
The government at least has incentives to make the best product they can on a local level. There might be politicking at the higher up, but their goal is to make a product. The incentives for larger consulting companies is to make money and often does so at the cost of cutting corners or delivering broken products. The reason why they can get away with it is because the larger consulting companies operate at a different scale than smaller ones, which is often needed for major projects. Which means then you're forced to work with scumbag consulting companies.
The fact that one extreme is false does not make the other extreme true.
That being said, at some point if you're cutting, or if you don't know where you're cutting, at some point you will hit bone. More money is not a panacea but neither is less.
I guess I don't understand your position other than "just make it run better." What concrete steps do you want to see occur to make the government run more efficiently, and will they grow or shrink the government?
If the government is going to contract out work it at least needs to have the capability to audit the results of such work on an ongoing basis, rather than just get left with a flaming bag of crap after the fact.
To that end the government needs to attract, develop, and keep in-house talent, starting by actually offering competitive compensation.
The obvious question nobody is asking is: why is the government obligated to pay for a broken service that should clearly be in violation of the contract? And if delivering a broken service doesn't violate the contract, why are these contracts being written so one-sided? There's more at play here than a lack of auditing. In the real world, if you don't deliver what you promise, you don't get paid.
Litigation for breach of contract is something that states can pursue. TFA:
> Deloitte isn’t alone in its tumultuous history with benefits systems. IBM, another major player in the government IT industry, was awarded a $1.3 billion, 10-year contract to modernize Indiana’s welfare system in 2006. The state canceled the contract just three years later after complaints of erroneous benefits denials and other problems. Indiana and IBM sued each other over the dispute; the case has not yet been resolved.
> Yet in 2010, IBM signed a $110 million deal with Pennsylvania to modernize its unemployment benefits system. The contract expired in 2013, ran millions over budget, and was never completed, according to a 2017 audit conducted by Pennsylvania auditor general Eugene DePasquale. In 2017, the state took legal action against IBM for breach of contract. That litigation is ongoing.
The problem is that the wheels of justice move slowly, and in the meantime the system is still broken, and the previous system is also probably not up to par (after all, if it was working there would be no need to replace it).
Big or small, inefficient govt is inefficient. Pushing for “small govt” either misses the point, or is dishonest, possibly with an ulterior motive.
I couldn’t possibly know what that motive is, but seems clear to me that a small inefficient govt would need to spend more on private sector contracts than a big inefficient govt, if it wants to do the same work; it would also have less capacity for audit, as gp points out.
>but seems clear to me that a small inefficient govt would need to spend more on private sector contracts than a big inefficient govt, if it wants to do the same work
The key phrase here is "same work." But I don't believe a small government should be doing the same work as a big government. It should be doing less work, have less responsibilities, and taking & wasting less of everyone's money.
Really the "small government" party likes to use crony "capitalism" to line the pockets of the "private-sector" with as much tax payer dollars as they can.
