In the U.S., we’re left with a patchwork benefits system, an indecipherable alphabet soup of programs ... The U.S. government spends nearly $1 trillion across dozens of separate programs at the state and federal level ... This all requires enormous administrative oversight on the part of the government, and it requires the ability to navigate multiple agencies on the part of recipients.
We already spend nearly a trillion dollars on various programs, and we've made it hard to use and hard to administer. Let's fix both with one swoop.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income
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Or, as they put it on NPR this morning: 90% of people may smoke pot and do nothing, but that other 10%?
ReplyDeleteI experienced this on a small scale when I lived in Alaska, where every resident gets a Permanent Fund Dividend check every year. They average between $1000 and $2000. Some people include them in their budgets and pray they are high, some people squirrel them away no matter the amount, some people blow them instantly, either on a big purchase or on a debauch. And every retailer offers various deals to get a piece of the annual bonanza.
ReplyDeleteWhether it's federal oversight of this patchwork or the massive private bureaucracy of the health insurance industry, the money that gets absorbed and wasted instead of delivering outcomes really pisses me off.
ReplyDeleteJason Morningstar Were you in Alaska long enough to get the permanent fund divided? How did that feel? I know they do it, but I have no idea what the qualia of that is like.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Weeks At one point, I considered a job contracting with SNAP to look for fraud. They estimate ~1% is fraud -- everything from selling the snap money to the grocery and getting cigarettes to spousal abuse. While this is a lot of money (I think the internet is telling me snap is ~75 billion, which sounds too high. 1% of that is 750 million.), 1% sounds like an acceptable error rate. So, I don't see the virtue in the position.
Yeah, 1% doesn't sound too bad, but spousal abuse does. So y'know... Also, I suppose it depends on how much it costs to pick the low-hanging fruit and how much of that 1% could be swept up cheaply.
ReplyDeleteI've worked in and around benefits in the uk for a while now, and I think I can confidently say that the spectre of "benefit fraud" is a tool to keep the working classes hating the poor, and to keep the poor distrustful of each other. i have seen more cases of families nearly starving to death due an erroenous (or malicious) fraud report, than i have actual fraudsters being exposed.
ReplyDeleteAs a cashier at a small market in 1989-90, I saw plenty of misuse of foodstamps. The typical scenario is buying a nickel-candy with a $1 stamp, getting change and using that to buy booze or tobacco. This was a dozens-of-times-per-shift event. I have no idea how prevalent that is system-wide or even if it falls under the umbrella of fraud, but it is something. The adversarial relationship that established between me and them is a great reason to prefer just giving them money, as far as I'm concerned.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols it felt fucking great. It was free money from oil revenues. I was there five years.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Weeks Yeah, I probably said that too fast: clearly, preventing spousal abuse is a good thing. They had much higher rates of fraud in the 80s and 90s -- as you saw! -- so, yeah, I think they've already got most of the low hanging fruit. And yeah, the bullshit adversarial relationship between the working and the not is a huge part of the problem of litmus tests and buying only in certain segments.
ReplyDeleteRyan Ó Laoithe Absolutely. just compare the difference in student debt to SNAP. My student loans were for anything related to education, and I got to decide what that meant. Food to keep me alive? Sure. Beer? Absolutely. Rent? Of course. And none of that would ever be considered fraud, but the beer sure would under snap. And that class difference is bullshit.
And also, snap now uses credit card-type payment rather than the stamps. You'll see "EBT" as a checkout option, and that's what that is.
Jason Morningstar Cool. I'd had some concern that free money would make people feel bad for some silly reason.
Free money, dude. The source may matter - Alaska made the incredibly prescient decision to sequester a chunk of their oil revenues to give back to the citizens, so it came from a source that felt just and good, resource extraction economy aside.
ReplyDelete(That student loan thing: I bought Bordeaux futures with my student loans in ~1994 and now I have cases of $150 bottles of wine in my cellar. People usually commend my industry rather than bitch that I misused public trust.)
ReplyDeleteChristopher Weeks the kind of fraud you describe has been eliminated by EBT cards, they're like debit cards that you can only use for approved items. They will not work for unapproved stuff at all. Also, because of the phenomena Ryan described above with keeping the working class snarling at the throats of the poor, grocery store checkers watch that shit like hawks.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've seen that change happen, I just wasn't thinking about it. That's a good example of low-hanging fruit, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI'd adore it if someone showed up to tell me why a minimum basic income is a bad thing. I suppose I can do the math: $3 trillion per year to end poverty. That's a bunch of money.
ReplyDeletePhilosophical grounds: is it the job of the government to give a handout? That almost certainly needs to be the line against this, but I find it odd enough that it is now hard for me to wrap my brainpan around.
One argument, I think, is that it will stimulate inflation of prices and the money will all end up in the private hands of the 1%. But like the article points out, we just don't know what's really going to happen!
ReplyDeleteChristopher Weeks Maybe, but doesn't it wind up there anyway?
ReplyDeleteThat is, I pay rent to a megacorp. I buy food from megacorps. I work for a megacorp. My retirement funds are with a megacorp. If I had a minimum basic income, that is unlikely to change and my money would still be in the hands of megacorps.