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Comment by galfarragem | Hacker News Reader

> That perspective isn't one you'll find popular in the nations that should be able to deploy programs like these, but don't. Their voters don't see them as helping the poor, and don't see the poor as likely to invest any protective income into survival.

That political discourse is easy to explain: while it is certainly helpful to "give the fish" to the starving one, it's less clear when you give the fish to "the idle" one instead of teaching him to fish.

The main difference is the meaning of "poor". The meaning of "poor" in Africa is someone that may eat once a day or not even that. In the west, the poverty line is way above that.

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Americans are so concerned with accidentally helping someone who doesn't deserve it that they'd rather sacrifice the well being of millions who do

Indeed. And our definition of "deserve" is perverse as well. It tends to mean "people like me".

Yes this the tradeoff we need to make more explicit in these discussions. Is it better to err on the side of feeding too many people? Or do we err on the side of extensively validating peoples' hunger status, knowing that for every inch of red tape added means another hungry person left in need.

Unemployment in CA went $23B in debt because of Covid (spent more in benefits than collected).

$11B is estimated to be fraud.

Your statement is quite trite to be honest.

So are the fraudsters poor people (before the payout obviously) or are they just fraudsters? Maybe we just need a better system.

What are you trying to advocate for; making it much harder to receive unemployment benefits? Then your statement demonstrates the exact point the parent commenter is trying to make.

89% of payments weren't considered fraudulent. I.e. it seems like you're suggesting that you'd rather sacrifice the well-being of the millions of people who received legitimate unemployment benefits just to prevent payments to a relatively small percentage of people who don't deserve them.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-25/californ...

What are you advocating for? Social programs that enrich organize crime to the tune of billions?

I'm advocating for the honest representation of the net utility for social programs by stating their benefits in addition to their downsides. It's not a fair representation to only show losses without acknowledging that without unemployment (or with more stringent fraud checks that also would increase false rejections), many people would have lost their homes or lives during the pandemic.

The mistake you make is assuming that your supposed 'noble intentions' justify what you are proposing; they do not. Your noble intentions are absolutely hypocritical and fake. If you really cared about the poor, you would voluntarily donate money from your own pocket; you don't need a law for that. Instead, you want to use the legislator to compel the others to the involuntary distribution of their hard-earned money.

A nation can just as easily 'accidentally help someone' to its own demise. What happens when you incentivize idleness on a national scale? What happens tax rates have to keep going up and up to fund the benefits of the idle? What about all the vast social welfare programs we already have in place here in America? What about the worker shortage that unemployment benefits caused just recently during the pandemic? A worker shortage I saw everywhere, first hand. Whatever country you're from, you're doing a bad job representing it.

> If you really cared about the poor, you would voluntarily donate money from your own pocket; you don't need a law for that. Instead, you want to use the legislator to compel the others to the involuntary distribution of their hard-earned money.

Why "instead"? Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?

Obligating people to do things that they don't agree with never lasts.

The US’ military budget says otherwise.

Not sure what you mean by this. Taxes are so ubiquitous that there's literally an idiom about it.

Our nation is founded on liberty.

> Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?

You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.

The poster suggested that you take on the personal responsibility for righting what you perceive as an injustice in the world. I agree with them.

Anything else would be tyranny, as others have pointed out.

> Our nation is founded on liberty.

I suspect we live in different nations, then.

> You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.

Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.

> I suspect we live in different nations, then.

""" The American republic was founded on a set of beliefs that were tested during the Revolutionary War. Among them was the idea that all people are created equal, whether European, Native American, or African American, and that these people have fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly. America’s revolutionaries openly discussed these concepts. Many Americans agreed with them but some found that the ideology was far more acceptable in the abstract than in practice. """ https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/foun...

> Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.

I am of the belief that taxes are appropriate to fund the limited function that the government was designed to fulfill. Namely goods/services which are public, such as providing national defense and a legal system for enforcing the number one principle, "voluntary transactions okay. Involuntary transactions not okay."

I am fine with taxes so long as they are providing a public good which cannot be met by the private sector due to factors such as nonexcludability. The types of things that are covered by that statement include things like national defense and law/policing such that the state can arbitrate on enforcement of private contracts as well as provide punishment for involuntary harm caused on a 3rd party.

In fact, that is the primary reason the founders were specific in direct vs. indirect taxes. Such a distinction provides clarity around how much of a public good can be created and how they can be paid for in a relatively fair fashion. Excise taxes are primarily consumption based, and all indirect taxes are subject to apportionment. Hence the absurdity of the 16th ammendment.

I do not consider wealth redistribution a function of the government, especially on the national level, as it is specifically excludable.

I agree with the stuff you say, but feel the last sentence is a bit of a personal attack.

"the idle" are almost universally those at the top of the wealth chain, doing nothing whatsoever and living handsomely off of rent, their ancestor's wealth and so on.

This myth of the idle poor has to die. Poor people are overwhelmingly working, and the vast majority are working much harder than the upper middle class, and almost universally harder than the 0.01%.

Unfortunately, most poor people made the mistake to work on crucial jobs such as nursing, teaching small kids, cleaning up, maintaining infrastructure, building buildings and so on. All jobs that are not deemed inprotant enough to deserve a living wage.

>"Americans are so concerned with accidentally helping someone who doesn't deserve it that they'd rather sacrifice the well being of millions who do"

This reads like hyperbole and cynicism. Americans as a whole donate a large amount to charity each year and the United States already has wide-ranging social welfare programs. I challenge the use of the word "accidentally", because there are legitimate concerns about dependency, freeloading, and quite frankly, fairness. It is easy to declare that some population is being "underserved" but the funds for that service need to come from somewhere. Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?

I am speaking in generalities because I don't know your exact stance on everything.

The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments.

In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to hide the report under the guise of "national security".

I shudder to think how much money is being skimmed from the pentagon budget, but no one seems to care.

> Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?

Its not, but I find it disturbing how, in general, even the smallest whiff of fraud from a social program, brings all sorts of regulations and cuts. But the Pentagon making 65 trillion dollars in adjustments to its budget in 2 years is meet with silence.

For me, I would rather every single person in this country go to bed with a full stomach, even if it meant some amount of fraud, then to let the pentagon piss away more money.

If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon. Doing a proper audit of that would probably get back so much money any fraud in social programs would be statistically insignificant.

>"If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon."

Personally, I am. And at large, just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex. The barriers to reducing military spending are different from the pressures put on politicians to manage social welfare programs.

> just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex

That's not my experience, Can't tell you the amount of people I've meet that have no problem with the military having a blank check.

35 trillion is almost double the entire GDP of the US, and almost 10x the entire federal budget. I don't know where you are getting that number.

Accounting adjustments, see https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion/ (one of many sources)

“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”

However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.

They're not saying that the US spends $35T on defense, they are saying that the budget is so complex that the aggregate value of internal transactions (i.e. budget allocation flowing down to sub-departments) is $35T. They use this complexity to claim (without evidence) that some money must be being skimmed.

Not a fan of the amount the US spends on defense, but I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.

> I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.

I'm with you but in this case the Pentagon hid the results of its first independent audit. There is no proof, but the fact they changed the rules to hide the results of the audit says all I need to know. If the pentagon wants to prove me wrong I'm all for it. Release the results and prove me wrong.

I won't hold my breath.

Money skimmed from the Pentagon budget is money not spent actively blowing up poor brown people abroad.

If anything is sacrificing the well-being of poor Americans who deserve better, it is the fact that helping them is punted to government bureaucracies instead of being done by private individuals and charitable organizations who are both able and motivated to exercise much better judgment about who needs help and what help is needed than any government bureaucrat can possibly do.

> instead of being done by private individuals and charitable organizations

Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism, not democracy. We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.

Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!

> Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism, not democracy

No, it isn't, it's freedom. Your definition of "democracy" is basically that if a 50.1% majority feels like it, they can commandeer your resources as they see fit. That is tyranny, not democracy.

> We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.

If you think there are people who deserve help and are not being helped by existing organizations, you start an organization to help them. If a democratic majority agrees with you that those people deserve help and aren't getting it, you'll have no trouble getting donations.

> Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!

And if you think government-run programs actually do what the "democratically decided criteria" say they are supposed to do, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you. Anyone who has actually had to deal with these government-run programs (as my wife and I have for years, both on behalf of friends who are constantly getting the runaround from bureaucratic screw-ups and from my wife's experience as a social worker) will tell you that they are terrible at actually helping people.

> Your definition of "democracy" is basically that if a 50.1% majority feels like it, they can commandeer your resources as they see fit. That is tyranny, not democracy.

You know neither tyranny or democracy.

Quite the opposite. Our instincts surrounding charity are to help when it won't directly hurt us -- but if everything is commoditized, all charity directly hurts us. A dollar we give to the poor today is a dollar we can't use to shelter our family on a future rainy day. Directly incentivizing against individual action and then insisting on individual action as the only path forward is a guaranteed recipe for continued failure -- which is exactly what we observe. This is a collective problem and collective action is the only viable path to solving it.

> A dollar we give to the poor today is a dollar we can't use to shelter our family on a future rainy day

So is a dollar you pay in taxes, ostensibly to help the poor but in reality it won't (see my post elsewhere in this thread on government bureaucracies). At least if you spend the dollar directly on a poor person, you know it's going directly to that poor person.

> Directly incentivizing against individual action

The only thing doing that is the government--by taking away our money in taxes, whether we agree with how it's spent or not, the government is preventing us from spending it on things we believe are justified, such as charity.

> continued failure -- which is exactly what we observe

We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor, by paying taxes, but most of that money doesn't actually help the poor. If people understood that either they have to help the poor directly or the poor won't get helped, you'd see many more people actually helping instead of punting it to the government in the mistaken belief that the government will take care of it.

> This is a collective problem

This is the excuse every collectivist uses to commandeer other people's resources and then squander them. Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself of helping the poor, so you'll outsource it to government bureaucrats. Who are even less motivated to actually help people than you are.

> government bureaucrats […] who are even less motivated to actually help people than you are

Can you explain how those who work in government are less motivated to help others than those employed outside of government?

Because the only way for the government to execute anything is to create a mindless, bureaucratic organization operating according to mindless, bureaucratic processes to do it. And the kind of person who will thrive in such an organization is not the kind of person who will be either good at helping others or motivated to do it. Only a private charity, answerable only to its owners and not to a fickle democratic process and a mindless bureaucracy, can exercise the kind of judgment required to find and keep the kind of people who are good at helping others and motivated to do it.

> So is a dollar you pay in taxes,

Nope.

My neighbor has to pay it too, and it's my neighbor that I'm bidding against for assets.

The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.

> We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor

Yes, my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.

> Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself

I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical. You know what sucks most about writing that big check to GiveWell every year? It's not the idea of devoting some of my work to a good cause -- that part feels good -- it's knowing that others won't, and that they will have an advantage over me as a result. Working harder for a good cause is one thing, getting a kick in the nuts on top of that is something else, defending the idea of rewarding charity with a kick in the nuts is something truly special, in the extra-chromosome sense of the word.

I believe that incentives matter, and I believe that fixing incentives is how we get out of this. We fix the incentives by making sure that everyone puts money into the pot.

> My neighbor has to pay it too, and it's my neighbor that I'm bidding against for assets.

No, you're not. You're bidding against the government and all of the contractors the government hires to do things. And the government can print money; you can't.

> The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.

Yes, and one of them is called "special interest politics". The way to overcome that through cooperation is for people to cooperatively agree to not give governments so much power.

> my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.

So basically, you don't think private charities, or at least churches, or at least churches like the one you grew up in, do a good job of helping people, based on your personal experience. Fair enough.

Next question: do you have personal experience with food stamp programs?

> I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical.

I'm not so sure, but let's assume for the sake of argument that you are. Then you have two choices:

(1) Since our country is a democracy, and since the majority of people don't actually want to help others (according to your hypothesis that we've accepted for the sake of argument), then you (and my wife and I, since we are atypical the same way you are) are outvoted. If the majority doesn't actually want to help people, their will should prevail and the government should stop doing it.

(2) If you want to argue that helping people is a good thing even if the majority doesn't want to do it, then you're admitting that you're willing to impose the will of a minority on the majority in a supposedly democratic country. In other words, you're basically saying that your will should prevail, on no other grounds than your personal opinion that helping people is a good thing.

Which do you pick?

> We fix the incentives by making sure that everyone puts money into the pot.

Forcing people to contribute money in taxes is not "fixing incentives". It's just brute force.

The best way to increase people's incentive to help others would be to remove the illusion that they can outsource that task to the government.

> The difference is the meaning of "poor". The meaning of "poor" in Africa is someone that may eat once a day or not even that.

The company mentioned that found cash programs work, GiveDirectly, works not only on a global scale, but within US borders, with similar results.

GiveDirectly's studies in developing countries are quite compelling, but I don't believed they've published any studies about the US yet.

Temporarily correct. I am eagerly awaiting the publication of results from "Evaluating one-time cash transfers to U.S. households during the COVID-19 pandemic", which has the trials completed, and analysis underway.

However, they have had previous programs of their own that ran in the US, such as their Hurricane Harvey relief programs. (Which haven't turned into research papers).

Much more important is the new Child Tax Credit ($3000 per year).

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