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Comment by discardorama | Hacker News Reader

What is not mentioned here is that many of the welfare recipients moved to SSDI (Social Security Disability Income). SSDI is paid for by the Federal government, so the states were incentivized to encourage this move. In fact, there are companies that specialize in applying for SSDI for welfare recipients, and charge per successful application.

There's the feel-good story, and then there's the harsh reality. The reality is, SSDI enrollment has gone up by a factor of 3X since this "welfare reform" thing passed.

I have a neighbor who is reasonably fit (he can move 100lb+ stones in his side gig as a landscaper), but he is on SSDI and collects a cool $3K/mo for doing nothing. Once you are on SSDI, it's very difficult to kick you off.

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I am hoping the slow expansion of Social Security and Disability will eventually bring Universal Basic Income to the USA. This is the only likely route for the USA to get UBI, since the political forces opposing UBI are very strong. But if we can push to expand the definition of "disability" and if we can lower the age of Social Security, then eventually we can get close to something like UBI. And hopefully, once we've passed some critical threshold (which might be 30% of the population or 50% or 80% or some other number) then the public will see the need to reorganize the way these programs are run, and hopefully when that reform is enacted, we will get a real UBI, implemented in a clear and concise way.

> push to expand the definition of "disability"

I think this is very much the wrong way to do it - you're suggesting that we can leverage people's existing thinking that "disabled == deserving" to expand who is considered "deserving". Whereas it could well go the other way and leave the public thinking "disabled == skiving". Plus the fact that encouraging people to label themselves "disabled" is debilitating and demoralising.

The only way to get UBI is to break the negative associations of voluntarily not working.

Something similar happened in the UK over the past decades: statistical bubble-pushing people out of the "unemployed" category into the "disabled" category.

So there was a lot of pressure to tighten up the system. Unfortunately, this just rewards the people who are better able to negotiate it, while resulting in an increasing number of people getting e.g. letters informing them they have to return to work while in the terminal cancer ward, people found dead with no food in their stomach, and suicides by medication.

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