Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve found this to be one of the strongest arguments for a strong social safety net, at least one centered around helping people to find new jobs or be retrained for new careers. Taxpayers and the economy in general do not benefit from preserving unnecessary jobs (whether in the govt or the private sector). It would be much better if society accepted that job & career turnover are necessary to a healthy functioning economy and embraced that reality by countering the disruptive downsides.

Even free market economists like Milton Friedman have argued for such programs. And at least for the time being, there is still plenty of work for people to do even if it’s different than what they were doing previously.

The hard part of this is designing the system in a way that avoids inevitable abuse, and then convincing people that it does so effectively.

I sometimes think the fears of abuse are overblown... people would choose to spend $100 to prevent $10 of abuse. It should obviously be taken into consideration, but eliminating abuse should not be the #1 goal.

Yes, I believe that as well (though I also don't think it means we should fully ignore actual abuse).

You'll often see the perception/possibility of abuse touted as a reason to replace many/all of these situation-dependent welfare programs with a Universal Basic Income, where there is much less to abuse and thus less need to police it.

Growing up in the inner city, I knew many people who took pride in their ability to manipulate the system, work as little as possible, and collect as much as possible. I don't think the fears of abuse are overblown at all.

I think this is why the working class tends to vote against social programs while the wealthy support social programs - working class people actually know "non-working" class people who live off the system.

Its not hard. Require people to pay back the money they received once they have a job. That’s how Switzerland does it. I‘ve seen so much abuse in Germany of the social security system that would be prevented by this simple measure.

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