This is only "surprising" to those who think they know how other people should live. I've always favored this approach (a minimum income, or negative income tax .. whatever you want to call it) as a replacement to all other forms of welfare.
If I am to spend my tax money on those in need, I do not want more than half of it going to upper middle class bureaucrats and middle class administrators.
How do you feel about things like Social Security Disability benefits? By most accounts there is some very real abuse of that social welfare program that could cause it to not be there for people who legitimately need it.
The cost of the abuse does not exceed the cost of losing the program entirely and leaving the non-abusers high and dry. It's not an ideal situation, but we are worse off if we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
No one suggests losing the program in its entirety, responses of like yours are straight up hyperbole. It is not a valid rebuttal to those looking to make corrective changes.
Far too many abuses are allowed to go on simply because of such arguments thereby reducing the aid we could give to truly needed people.
I am all for helping those in need, nearly 2% of my gross salary goes to CHOA each year, but damn if I am going to believe that there are people on one if not more of the hundred of government programs who don't deserve to be there. The best way to help people is to get more diligent about policing those we do help. Are they getting the right help is the question that we must answer.
> The best way to help people is to get more diligent about policing those we do help
Would the cost of doing that exceed the savings? If so (and that seems rather likely; the vast majority of social welfare recipients do _not_ cheat), it seems rather impractical.
In practice, people cheat in all systems, and a certain amount of cheating is built into the assumptions for any well-designed system. For instance, tax authorities do not audit everybody, because it would be impractical; in not doing so they accept a certain amount of tax fraud. Shops don't watch everyone who comes in the door all the time, because it would be impractical; in not doing so they accept a certain amount of theft (most of what accountants call 'shrinkage' is employee and customer theft).
If your win condition is "eliminate all cheaters", you've already gone to "ditching the program in its entirety". Human systems have defectors, otherwise game theory wouldn't exist.
If your win condition is "eliminate most of the cheaters", I'd like some proof that we're not already at the Nash Equilibrium for that with the current system.
The point is we are close to loosing the system because of the abuses though. The SSDI fund is predicted to be the first to run out of money which is projected to be only a few years away at the current rate.
I agree! This is why I've long argued that companies should be required to pay a portion of their employees' paychecks in nontransferable vouchers. If parents want to blow their I-Bank or Google paychecks on MacBooks, cocaine, and hookers, after responsibly buying jackets and healthy food for their kids, that's their prerogative. But the first $n0,000 should be paid out in restricted vouchers to make sure they provide for their kids first.
Another way to do this would be to have a Basic Income that pays out to minors separately from their parents, but into an account/card that, for minors, is restricted to certain products/services (somewhat like how foodstamps work, but more generally toward childcare/food/clothing/education-type products.) The parents would have power over the child's account, just as parents do today, but only given the same restrictions.
I think this is feeding into a prevalent and false narrative that persons in poverty are all drug addicts or welfare queens.
Christian Parenti really sums it up well when he describes American views on poverty in his book, The Soft Cage:
"In a society that denies the true causes of poverty—low wages and structural unemployment—the poor necessarily show up as objects of mystery to be examined, measured, interrogated, and indexed, or as James C. Scott would put it, made “legible.” In a society that hides the real mechanics of exploitation and sees all social phenomena through the lens of individualism, it is assumed that the poor—their genetics, their habits, or their culture—must be the true cause of poverty."[1]
Specifically with respect to your point about drugs:
"Reports such as the National Survey of Drug Use and Health suggest drug abuse among welfare recipients is hardly widespread. Many states have tried drug testing for welfare recipients with practically nobody testing positive. In Arizona, for example, in 2012, after three years and 87,000 screenings, one person had failed a drug test. Utah's drug screening program spent $30,000 on testing and only 2.5% of recipients turned out positive for illicit drugs. Florida's program had the same results.
"In all cases, the testing -- which assumes all welfare recipients are druggies -- cost much more than the savings in welfare payments."[2]
We need to stop acting paternalistically toward the poor and, instead, treat them as people who are capable of making their own decisions.
This is silly - the poor are not unemployed, structurally or otherwise. To be unemployed one must be looking for work, which most American poor are not.
Your source [2] also disagrees with you. When Florida implemented drug testing, they spent $46k to identify 108 drug users (presumably taking them off the welfare rolls). Unless welfare costs less than $425/person, that's a net savings. Further, according to the article linked to by [2] (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story...), the actual number in Florida is closer to 2000 people since 2000 people withdrew their welfare applications when they reached the drug testing stage.
(The comparable number in Utah was $2000/person, if we assume Utah's program had no deterrent effect whatsoever. Arizona's program seems less effective, likely because the drug tests were easy to avoid - just don't tell the welfare clerk you do drugs and you can skip the test.)
Let me quote the first paragraph, which you apparently didn't read:
...46.2 million people...lived below the official poverty level...10.4 million individuals were among the “working poor”
in 2011... The
working poor are persons who spent at least 27 weeks in
the labor force (that is, working or looking for work )
> This is silly - the poor are not unemployed, structurally or otherwise. To be unemployed one must be looking for work, which most American poor are not.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level. Also, if you know anything about the workings of Temporary Assistance for Need Familiies (TANF), the main federal block grant for welfare as defined under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), then you know that 1) welfare recipients must work for 24 months to continue receiving welfare, and 2) that there is a 5-year lifetime limit on being in welfare [1]. So, though your report mentions that most people below the federal poverty line, there's plenty of evidence to assume 1) those who aren't working are also not on welfare, with the possibility that 2) those who aren't looking for work have simply given up, as is the case for many, many Americans post-2008 recession.
> Your source [2] also disagrees with you.
Clarification, if anything the source disagrees with itself since the entirety of my use of it was within quotation marks. That said, I don't think it does disagree with itself. 1) We have no idea what the welfare/person spending was, as you note, so it's "silly" to assume that there were obvious net savings when we simply don't have the data. If you're not willing to trust the source on that, then at least trust the numbers for Arizona and Utah. Secondly, you say that "the actual number in Florida" was close to 2000, that 2000 people withdrew their applications when reaching the drug testing stage. You're obviously implying that they withdrew because they were on drugs and wary of not passing the test. You fail to mention the financial aspect to the drug tests--the welfare applicants themselves had to pay for the drug test according to the source you link to [2]. It was highly plausible, as noted in the article, that the ones who didn't take the test couldn't net that amount of cash.
As to Florida's program itself, it was deemed unconstitutional and stopped since it "unconstitutionally mandated searches without suspicion."[2] This was for the same reason you note that the Arizona program was "less effective"--namely because it didn't assume that just because a person was poor, they were using drugs.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level.
I certainly am accounting for those who've given up. They are "not looking for work", i.e. not unemployed. Accounting for children does change the fact that the poor choose not to work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 .
As for your assertions that paying $30 for a drug test prevented people from applying for welfare, that doesn't pass the smell test. Anyone who passed was reimbursed, and welfare pays well over $30 anyway. If you want to hang your hat on the fact that I haven't found a source proving that welfare costs more than $425/person, be my guest.
(On a side note, a "large bag of cocaine" sounds like a business investment, investing in the highest return commodity available to the investor... not that I condone it, but it is somewhat different from what I assume you intended, namely buying recreational drugs for personal use rather than providing for one's children).
Well, "data" might not have been the best choice of words. I was thinking back to the times I've seen, interacted with, or heard second-hand of drug addicts (or read studies) -- and I couldn't think of any cases where the statement hold true. The only context I could see it as true, was as an (unfounded) prejudice.
So, I was really just wondering if you've ever had any first or second-hand indication that your assertion isn't just bullshit.
Depends on the program, but generally it ranges from 0 to 20%, most being right around 10%. This changes when republicans win on their "voucher" planks, when suddenly the overhead skyrockets because there are for-profit entities in the loop.
As I understand it, the idea of a voucher is that the for-profit entity receives the money after the end beneficiary does, which wouldn't affect how much the end beneficiary gets. What are you talking about?
Some programs, like schools, dispense services rather than cash. If you're talking about direct payment programs these are extremely efficient: 4.5% for SCHIP in 2005, for example. Other direct payment programs have higher overhead because they are means-tested (another conservative victory) and it costs money to administer means-tested programs.
Amusingly, the US state of Florida in 2011 enacted another one of those republican favorites, the drug test for welfare recipients. In practice it cost more to administer the drug tests than they saved by throwing the positive results out of the program, because it turns out that welfare recipients are far less likely than the general public to use drugs.
A lot of "voucher systems" (a) impose overheads, which are generally paid by the donor and not the participating company or (b) use hidden, non-open-market (and potentially higher) pricing.
If I am to spend my tax money on those in need, I do not want more than half of it going to upper middle class bureaucrats and middle class administrators.