>"It's awful when we hear of millions of dollars going into the wrong hands," he added, "but it was probably within a somewhat acceptable threshold of error or margin of error" because Congress opted for speed over accuracy when it flooded the U.S. economy with money last spring
I also remember at that time hearing talking heads saying things to the effect of "we are getting money out to everyone now, we'll worry about collecting it back from people who aren't eligible later."
IIRC some federal government money can be withheld if you owe the IRS and most of these recepients seem to be collecting social security so it seems just docking future SS payments to collect back the $1,200 might be the best solution. Even if it can't be collected that way with existing laws, Congress can always pass a law allowing it. Though many checks might not be cashed in the first place if the recipient didn't have an American bank account.
Of the 2.2 trillion, 500 billion was set aside for whatever. This was often reported as the part for big business. Actually it's 500b to seed new special purpose banks that can operate with 10 to 1 leverage. So the 500b is actually 5.5t, making the whole bill several times larger than widely discussed.
I'm reminded of the "chain CPI" fiasco where Congress tried to reduce Social Security, but hid it in a technical detail. Except this time Democrats were on board. Neither party challenged the main narrative, and so the media didn't bother to either.
https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/4/28/the-cares-act-will-...
> the CARES Act may end up serving as the second largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy in our lifetimes.
All the scrutiny and bureaucracy should be on the tax collection side rather than on the service side.
Retail tries to keep 'shrinkage' to a number that is below the threshold of detection to a point they can just built it into their cost models and not worry too much about the rest.
What it does do, is restore just a small amount of confidence in the election process, something that is woefully lacking, people are so disillusioned with how far the divide in the US is, that half of them believe the Russians planted the current president via election fraud, and the other half believed that the current president's loss in the recent elections is invalid due to fraud.
Lack of confidence in elections, eventually leads to revolutions, voter ID is a small token of a way to restore some of that confidence and to assume people are too poor or uneducated to get a state issued ID, is "White mans burden" under a different guise.
Voter ID laws may not be inherently racist, but they are designed by racist people to disproportionately impact black Americans.
I mean, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with some of the big-picture conclusions, but the logic along the way is a long bit... off.
When you have that kind of obvious cognitive dissonance, it should be an obvious sign you believe something false.
On a mile-high level, two things to consider:
1) Your base are your core, key supporters. They're the people who are 100% committed to voting for you, go to rallies, make small donations money, volunteer, and man phone lines. You can't run an effective campaign without a base.
Trump's base is rural America and displaced predominantly white workers in decaying manufacturing cities. Fox News swings between playing clips of democratic elites calling them "privileged whites" and "racist redneck trash."
2) On a national level, in turns of number of votes, it doesn't matter much how many people live in smaller states. Whether it's one person or a half-million people, they get three electoral votes. Appealing to that base is a good tactic.
> half of them believe the Russians planted the current president via election fraud
> the other half believed that the current president's loss in the recent elections is invalid due to fraud.
The first half believe there was malign Russian interference on social media and direct collusion with the campaign. The second half believes mail-in votes were fraudulent. Voter ID would not allay either of these concerns. But let's not get bogged down in details, because I understand the wider points you're trying to make.
> the common trope is that black people are unable or unwilling to get an ID, but that in and of itself is a pretty racist implication
Not black specifically, but urban, working poor and the homeless. And it's not racist, it's rooted in facts.
> Any US citizen can go to their local DMV and get a state issued ID.
This costs time and money. At my local DMV in California, any interaction takes 2 hours of standing in line. That's not counting the time it takes to get there and go back to work. For a person without state ID means taking the bus or riding a bike or walking.
Working poor people are hourly workers, and DMVs are not open outside of normal working hours. So a working poor person must sacrifice half a day's wages to apply for an ID. And that's if all their documentation is in order the first time (don't scoff; I've had to go back multiple times because I was missing something or the official made a mistake).
Compared to that, an office worker can easily take a half day off with no loss in wages. Is this not a regressive tax in order to exercise a fundamental right?
> What it does do, is restore just a small amount of confidence in the election process
That's the stated reason for voter ID laws. However, good, fair, voter ID laws would also make provisions to ensure that the poor are not disproportionately affected by this new requirement. They'd keep DMVs open for longer or on weekends (in fact some states did the opposite after passing voter ID laws - by closing DMVs or reducing hours). They'd waive fees for low-income people. They'd automatically register graduating high schoolers - do it the same day as yearbook pictures. They'd let volunteers supervised by government employees run voter ID registration stations at grocery stores, churches, and community centers on weekends and evenings. Collecting documents and taking pictures isn't particularly hard - you could get some Boy or Girl Scouts to take ID pictures for merit badges.
Given the hyper-partisan nature of American politics, a good voter ID law has a very small chance of being passed anywhere. The point of voter ID laws, as they are written today, is to suppress the urban poor vote. So the side proposing the laws has no incentive to help the urban poor get voter ID. And the side opposing voter ID laws takes umbrage to anything that adds friction to getting voters in the booths on election day, fearing (rightfully) the intentions of such efforts.
How do you solve all this?
There is no doubt that their are inefficiencies in the process but, it is after all government services, their is no incentive for them to perform better or to provide a decent customer experience because they hold regulation and a monopoly on the process. I get it, I mean in FL they won't take your old licence (if it is expired) as proof that you are you, even though they issued it and can verify that while it is expired, it is an official id that they issued. I know because I had to deal with it, as well as deal with the fact that at some point they stopped recognizing hospital issued birth certificates, that did not have the state encoding strips on them. That being said, inefficiency of government does not invalidate the need to restore faith in the election process on several levels. Rather it means we look at ways to make it more efficient and change the incentive process to do so.
I don't disagree that these items could be distributed to other trusted entities. I mean I would be all for the poll watchers being able to take the documentation and issue the ID right there on the spot at no charge.
And I don't disagree that there are a lot of agendas at play, but I honestly don't know how people come to the conclusion that the average minority /poor will be disenfranchised by this. I cannot speak to whether it would disenfranchise the homeless as I would hazard to guess that not many among it's community actually vote. I know where I live (The Florida Keys) we have a very high homeless, working poor and transient population. Most of those that actually work, posses some form of state ID, but I could not say for the homeless that panhandle.
I am all for making it as frictionless as possible and I agree on fees for the poor, but I just don't see the racist implication which is generally what I have heard bandied about in the dogma. I personally see it as a valuable step towards election integrity and that is my primary concern. No one is letting off the gas, and given how insulated we have been in the US to political strife, I don't think the majority of both sides sees how close we are too the edge of the cliff, but everyone just wants to keep the pedal down. We will not go on long with lack of faith in our representatives being duly elected and the less faith people have the more prone they are to wild conspiracies of Russian hookers peeing on candidates, and pizza parlor pedo houses. We truly are at that level of crazy, and that level of crazy makes people easy targets for manipulation.
The goal isn't financial but cultural. You don't want a corrupt culture. At the time you've hit billions of dollars of corruption, it's like termites hollowing out your house structure or COVID19 shutting down your country for 9 months. If killing those first few termites costs THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS or you were spending A MILLION DOLLARS for each COVID19 case coming into your country to definitely get it under control, it's a bargain.
The PPP program concluded with $130 billion still in the bank. What a waste!
That's by design, sadly.
As an example, a family with two middle-class wage earners and 3 kids received $6,000. For a total household income in the "middle class" range, that's a nice bump.
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-...
The stock (CLCT) for the largest card grading service went up 200% over the past year, after hardly moving the prior four or five years.
Another term for 'saved' is 'spent slowly'.
That could have been a point. However the important and highly cited purpose was to provide assistance by 'getting cash into the hands of Americans that need it' (following job loss, etc). The point of assistance is to assist the recipient.
Edit: Maybe my editorializing wasn't well received, but the facts are correct regardless:
The spending primarily includes $300 billion in one-time cash payments to individual Americans (with most single adults receiving $1,200 and families with children receiving more[5]), $260 billion in increased unemployment benefits, the creation of the Paycheck Protection Program that provides forgivable loans to small businesses with an initial $350 billion in funding (later increased to $669 billion by subsequent legislation), $500 billion in aid for large corporations, and $339.8 billion to state and local governments.[6]
Surely it couldn't haven been inconceivable to imagine that Congress may want to send widespread stimulus to most everyone with a week or two or turnaround. The 2008 financial crisis was barely more than a decade ago. How hard could it possibly be, in 2020, to setup a secure, cross-verified, system for taxpayers to update their information online?
Defending the incompetence of the Treasury Department, is like defending a cook who burns down the kitchen because he never inspected his fire extinguishers. "What did you expect the guy to do? He had to move fast!"
The distinction I'm making: A plan may take 1-4 weeks to form with 1-10 participants. They could tell you exactly what's needed in order to implement a stimulus check program like this safely and accurately. But the implementation is going to take weeks or months more work and 10-1000 participants to effect it.
The planning is "cheap" and done as a matter of course. That covers things like disaster recover and conops. But it doesn't, on its own, actually create a final "product". Only the plan for what to do when an emergency or directive comes down the pipe.
The implementation is expensive. And they need authority to execute it. If they're not funded for it, they aren't going to do it.
Pretty difficult. People don't want to update, don't have access to computers, some are here living and working and aren't citizens or are undocumented, some people don't trust the government or don't want the government tracking them anymore than they already do. You name it.
Even if you didn't have these systematic issues, it's a political football. Can't ask the wrong questions on the census b/c politics, for example. How would you even know that every American eligible got a check if you can't even get a count of every American?
I doubt much has changed and things are cobbled together. Like all large legacy environments, reimagining is costly, complex and prone to high failure rates. They should never move off the mainframe.
Isn't there? The Fed (and monetary economists) always talk about how much easier it would be to stimulate with a "helicopter drop"[0], wouldn't they already know how to pull that off?
Even if it were done by Congress rather than the Fed, the Fed's process could still be the delivery mechanism.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/us/california-unemploymen...
There's also fraud from the money that's supposed to go to small businesses. My family lives in Chicago and it feels like their entire neighborhood all got $10,000 by pretending to be small businesses, and they teach each other how to do it. Everyone they know has gotten money from that and its become a meme ("did you buy that coat with your 10K check?"). My family is trying their best to resist also throwing in some applications to just get a piece of that.
Maybe because all those metrics have almost no correlation how a below median income household operates.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/nov/25/us-hunger-surge...
Why don't you ask the waitress at Denny's who's had her hours cut in half how the S&P 500 affects her?
Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
I'm almost unsure how to reply because you seem to ignore the central point of the comment you're replying to. Your characterization omits the most salient point: That it had to be done fast. I don't see how the tradeoffs in emergency distribution of funds are in any way indicative of whether you can trust welfare states to be administered properly or not. The comment was precisely about "lack of administrative rigor" being warranted in favor of preventing greater harm.
> Does Sweden send welfare checks to Americans who aren't Swedish citizens? If not, perhaps that partly explains why the Swedes are more comfortable with an expansive welfare state than Americans.
I don't understand how this point relates to the general value of welfare systems that you are discussing. Are you saying an American welfare system has to be inherently less reliable? Or that there are more Americans than Swedes so statistically Sweden will receive more accidental checks from America than the reverse? Could you elaborate?
It had to be done fast, and it had to be handled by a department that's chronically underfunded due to decades of underfunding fueled by all the political hand-wringing for which terms like "welfare state" have become watchwords.
One could mount an argument that that's irrelevant, the real problem is that the IRS is being asked to do something like this in the first place, and there would otherwise be no need to have an organization that's well-funded and competent enough to handle things like this quickly and accurately. I personally find those sorts of arguments specious, though, by virtue of being anti-democratic. This is not Plato's Republic, and we do not get to rely on infallible philosopher kings to make our decisions. As long as there is a plurality of opinions, and as long as opinions change over time, there will always be this sort of tug-of-war and sloppiness as the policy decisions being made now interact poorly with the policy decisions that were being made at other times.
Or perhaps I should say ademocratic? It's arguably sensical to think, "Everything would work great if it just went my way," but it's best to relegate that sentiment to the world of political thought experiments. Taking it as an unstated major premise in an actual political discussion about current policy decisions in a functioning democracy is painfully impractical. It's just like code: If you try to deal with a messy legacy system by closing your eyes and blithely steamrollering along with your own clean, modern code, the end result will not be more clean and modern. It will just be an even bigger mess.
There is no reason why someone can't support the welfare state and also demand efficiency. That demand represents an ideal; there will always be errors, but the insistence that all errors are unavoidable and that (as the parent suggested) we shouldn't even talk about them is extremely irritating. It provides the enemies of the welfare state with the best possible arguments ("you don't even care if the money is going to people who need it").
See the UK government's current (over the last 10 years) approach to welfare. Lots of money spent on checks which are run almost seemingly malicously incompetently, the vast majority of rejections not being upheld when they go to court (even more expensive), assuming the claiment hasn't died by then (as many have due to extreme poverty).
It's the kind of argument which carries a lot of emotional weight (everyone hates a cheater) but it's really hard to believe is being taken in good faith from a rational, cost-reduction perspective.
I mean, they sent what, $34m overseas erroneously of $2T?
Doing some quick napkin math, for every $1,000,000 spent, $10 accidentally went overseas?
Why does this seem poor to you? That seems like less than a rounding error in a rounding error....
Far less. That $34m included disbursement to non-resident US citizens. Considerably more than 28,333 US citizens live overseas. I have had to file tax returns for 10 years despite not living in the US and having no US income, you bet your ass I cashed that check.
Objecting to social programs because they have minuscule errors drives me up the wall.
It makes sense if you consider weak people to be exploitable material for powerful interests. Social programs interfere with that dynamic - ergo the endless propaganda and demonetization of compassion.
My point was not that the welfare state is shoddy but that, if you support the welfare state, mistakes like this should bother you more, not less.
Why? I support social programs, I accept some inefficiencies and waste.
In general I think small waste is not worth the energy to be concerned about if the benefit is huge.
That said, I think means testing is a waste of everyone's time. Just provide the benefits to everyone -- it simplifies the process of providing the benefit.
In other words, blithe dismissals like "I accept some inefficienies and waste" provide the other side with the best possible ammunition against the idea of a welfare state.
It's laughable to see the number of people here who, straight-faced, say nonsense like "Nitpicking efficiency is for the capitalists".
This doesn't follow at all.
As long as the policies are progressive (in the economic sense) and enough money gets to those who need it, why should small inefficiencies bother me? Nitpicking efficiency is for the capitalists.
If you spend $100M to reduce waste by $34M, then did you actually reduce waste?
It works out to $10 erroneous dollars for every $1,000,000. That's 99.999% accuracy and that doesn't sound shoddy to me at all.
Generally, yes, if they worked for some time in Sweden. There is probably a non-zero error rate associated with that too. It's not like the gov't is sending checks to random Swedes - they were sent based on available sufficient tax criteria not originally intended to be used for entitlement distribution.
I do suspect most countries wouldn't have a problem on the scale the US might because a) they have larger, simpler entitlement programs (qualifications tend to be based on a a small number of straightforward residency classes), and b) they do not generally process any tax paperwork from non-residents. It is the US's stinginess and paradoxical fear of inefficiency that hurts it here.
The amount in question is less than 0.0011%. Literally a thousandth of a precent.
Meanwhile the result was keeping hundreds of millions afloat of Americans (at least until we decided to abandon them again for the sake of politics)
Besides, since when is a leaner government protection against an incompetent government? We're literally watching thousands of Americans die as proof this theory of "the less my government does the less it can do wrong" is completely nonsensical