You can’t game something when the maximum award is still designed to be Not Enough On Its Own. That describes quite literally every US government aid program— from food stamps and school lunch debt at the very bottom of the financial ladder, to grants+loans for those who have demonstrated the academic merit to get into college, to healthcare and social security for literally every citizen in this entire country.
There is not a single program in the US, by careful design, that can give “too much”. Yet we still spend so much money on the bureaucracy trying to disqualify anyone from their own programs.
Imagine how much we’d save, socially (less homelessness! no death for lack of healthcare! a more educated and informed country!) but also maybe financially, if we actually _gave our people what they need_.
People don't want to see people on their perceived level getting something they are not. People will accept people they perceive as at a lower level getting something but it can't be more than them . Because many people working are at the poverty level or lower these programs have to be set lower than that which is lower then the minimum needed.
The money spent on fighting individuals could be offered as a top-up to the working poor which would other programs to raise levels.
yes, there are the millions dead in various "cultural" and agri-"cultural revolutions, the millions dead in gulags because they opposed the horrors of communism. i grew up in it, and it makes me vomit when someone mentions that murderous ideology.
true, like there are many cults that last for a while before they become murderous or just peter out. when it scales up to country level (USSR, China, Cambodia, Cuba...) communism is always murderous. Just give me an example that contradicts that.
There’s a whole lot of spectrum between what GP’s parent is suggesting and communism. In fact, no one even brought up communism until the parent’s fairly vapid Marx quote. Is that the one that made you vomit?
No one I know on disability is gaming the system or doing well. It is not enough money. No one I know wants to be on it either, they just would die otherwise. Some kind of ultra ignorant rock you’re under.
One of the things I’m deeply afraid of getting older is becoming a right-wing, neoliberal Randist, and using years of being alive as an excuse to dismiss everything and act self righteous and haughty
Some years back, and acquaintance of mine detailed how he gamed the system. He'd work until he met the minimum number of employed weeks to qualify for unemployment, then he'd do a lousy job so he'd get laid off. He'd then go on unemployment. Being unemployed required him to look for a job, so he'd look for a job, and flunk the job interview. When the unemployment compensation ran out, then he'd get a job again. Over and over and over.
BTW, when he was "unemployed", he'd take off-the-books jobs.
A businessman acquaintance told me how he'd found some well qualified people he wanted to hire. They said they'd take the job, but only after their unemployment compensation ran out.
The Seattle Times ran an article a couple decades ago (wish I'd saved it) where they went around interviewing people on welfare. They'd ask "what would you do if the welfare was cut off?" The answer was "get a job." They interviewed people in a car with fishing gear. "Where are you going?" "Fishing" "Don't you have jobs?" "No, we get welfare." "Wouldn't you rather have a job?" "No, we'd rather go fishing."
Sure, there are people who should be on welfare. But there are a lot of people gaming it.
Every government program designed to hand out money if specific requirements are met results in companies and individuals springing up to game it.
"For every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud (via a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service). Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been overpaid due to recipient fraud.
To put this into perspective, the IRS estimates that for every $6 owed in federal taxes, $1 is not paid because of tax evasion or fraud."
This comment I put up there with talking about welfare queens. It shows someone's politics immediately.
Fraud as defined by these authors is very rare. They are not talking about what the average person is when they talk about common welfare fraud. These studies mean outright fraud, not someone able body choosing to game the system instead of working.
If you changed the definition to match the collequal understanding of fraud your results would not be a number literally everyone who lives in neighborhoods where benefit recipients are the majority laughs at when told.
It's like saying the PPP program had very little outright fraud. True. But in my mind, you committed fraud if you took the money and didn't actually end up truly needing it for it's intended purpose. Most share my definition. Under that definition I'd posit the vast majority of PPP recipients participatated in fraud, but it will never show up in the studies or numbers.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time actually living within these communities understands the situation with benefits looks pretty much like the situation with PPP writ large.
This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" anecdotes with no facts backing them up don't work well on a site where people research things instead of taking them at face value. If you want that kind of echo chamber, may I recommend Facebook or something similar?
70% (approximately) of people on welfare already have a job. That's strange isn't it? Not going fishing. Not living the life working under the table. No, doing the hard jobs you expect to be done for next to nothing, for your comfort and convenience.
They clean your hotel rooms, wait on you at restaurants and check you out at your local Walmart that destroyed all the other work in their town, and then paid them so little they had to apply for help to feed their children. These vital jobs that people expected to be done even in the middle of a pandemic, well they don't pay enough to live off of anymore. Because the wealth only moves in one direction and has for decades.
Welfare the majority of the time is a hand up not a hand out, 50% of recipients are able to get off of it inside of a year, 70% inside of 2 years and if we should have a few people who game the system, oh well. It's a necessary evil to make sure women and children are not on the streets, to ensure that once you are down you are not out, because we are the most prosperous nation on earth and we can EASILY afford it, and part of the social contact entailed in being an American is you care for your fellow Americans. Unless you are someone who sits around ruminating about what an injustice it is that a portion of your income is used to keep children from being hungry and how very unfair that is to you.
I pay more than what I am asked in taxes, I contribute to charities at a rate that most people would be surprised by, and I can tell you this. Every charity in our country is a failure of our government. Every church that proselytizes via helping the poor does so because the system we built is not working for it's constituents, and myopic people want to spend a bunch of time fighting about who gets what of the very, very thin slice of the pie, instead of actually doing the hard work of reforming the bakery. If there is any truth to your anecdotes at all consider this; it might be more telling of you and the moral fibre of those you surround yourself with than people at large.
It's an absolute pain to actually apply for unemployment. It's not a reliable gambit. I can't even do it right now for NY; their website is down every weekend for "maintenance" (total bs that such a thing exists) when they want people to "certify" for unemployment.
Almost like we should just blanket-provide the same amount of aid and safety net to everyone, cut out any and all pre-qualifications, and completely change our tax system to ensure all costs are recaptured by a progressive tax system.
That way someone who used aid and becomes wealthy would pay into it in the future. Right now our systems more or less just keep you where you are.
My first instinct was to post a detailed takedown, and I started to go into Washington State's unemployment system eligibility and benefit criteria... but on reflection I don't think most of those things you just told us actually happened. There is a history of anti-welfare activists lying about the facts they have observed and those lies forming immortal zombie collective memories. Numerous examples in Reagan speeches are still repeated as fact today despite being debunked in the 80's, repeated as part of a consensus conventional wisdom by both political parties. So why bother?
If you'd like to sanity-check your recollections, try to figure out what the people in question would be eligible for, and try to figure out what it would actually cost to live in Seattle.
I will point out the number of politicians who were shocked, shocked when they went to backdoor COVID relief through the unemployment system, and found that most state systems were deliberately neglected to the point of abject dysfunction, or had erected punitive gating systems that defeated most applicants.
> I don't think most of those things you just told us actually happened
Believe whatever you need to. But consider this:
People are fundamentally selfish. Building a system that assumes general altruistic behavior is not going to work very well. Assuming people will not take advantage of rules for their personal benefit is naive.
Consider politicians. Have you ever noticed that people tend to go into Congress as middle class people and come out wealthy? How do you think that happens? Altruism?
How many people offered student loan forgiveness will say "no thanks, I borrowed the money, I'll pay it back!"?
The people I mentioned were not breaking the law. But they were taking advantage of it.
Just some thoughts from a fellow graybeard (if I had a beard). Take em or leave em: Bitterness about somebody else who's worse off than you getting things you don't think they deserve, doesn't add to one's own happiness or wellbeing. Don't let those example people live rent-free in your head. They're barely eeking out an existence on some US State's laughable safety net. I seem to remember you're likely a computer professional and doing just fine.
If you're one of the few people in the world doing well enough to be paying into a system rather than relying on one, thank your lucky stars for how blessed you are. Ultimately, nobody on their deathbed contemplating their life cares about who their taxes were spent on.
If you simply must be mad at someone getting government handouts without need, there's a big list of companies who use accounting tricks to pay no taxes and even get subsidies from the government. You're probably better off being mad at them than some guy who's figured out how to go fishing while collecting unemployment.
I'm just saying that when you incentivize people to do X, be aware that X is what you're going to get, every time.
I remember when the unit at the company I worked for decided to put a big graph of the bug count on the wall, and announced incentives for retiring bug reports. Within a week, the entire unit had devolved into knock-down drag out fights over who had solved a bug, if a bug was really a bug, if a bug was actually 3 bugs and the person should get 3 credits for solving it, people filing fake bug reports and then "fixing" them, etc. A couple more weeks of that and the graph was taken down and the incentive program terminated. These were intelligent, well-educated people, going berserk.
There was another case where the company got a big contract from IBM, and hired some mercenary contractors to fulfill it. Part of the deal was each mercenary got a $10,000 bonus (worth about $30,000 today) for getting it done on time. I'm sure you know what happened. It shipped the day before the deadline.
I asked one of them, "did the bonus get you to finish on time?" The response, "absolutely not, it had nothing to do with it. We're professionals!"
I think people raise hundreds of millions of dollars to win a job that pays less than a junior SWE because they’re just so darn public spirited, obviously.
Apropos of anything else, COVID relief was never going to come through the unemployment system. Too many issues of pride and other such things like you mention, but also the grift potential of the PPP scheme worked hugely in its favor. As of now, less than 15% of those loans were ever paid back (I know that forgiveness was an expected part of it, but nonetheless, that number…)
