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Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist for government aid with NO means-testing. If a government program only exists to support the poor, it will be birocratized, sacrificed whenever budget cuts are needed, demonized and so on.

Successful social programs help everyone, and let the poor benefit implicitly more. All old people benefit from the existence of Medicare for example, even if they are personally wealthy enough to afford alternatives, so Medicare is relatively simple to access and almost universally loved. No one is going to win elections campaigning on slashing medicare, and no one is in danger of losing their Medicare status if they fill out a form wrong.

One of my examples related to means testing. I have many more not related at all to means testing.

Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".

Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.

Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.

If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.

That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.

To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.

It is not means testing it is complete and total lack of any kindof of responsibility or accountability.

Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job. Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely ignored.

There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.

> Your examples are exactly why people on the left insist for government aid with NO means-testing.

This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.

That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose nationalized medicine.

Coming from a country surrounded by other countries, all with national healthcare institutions, I can assure you that healthcare discrimination is unthinkable once you have universal healthcare rights.

This is the real argument for things like UBI and simple tax credits, that often goes unnoticed. Giving poor people money doesn't need to have outstanding effects to be worthwhile, it just needs to be better than the existing mess of overlapping institutional red tape. This goes for healthcare too. Get rid of complex government assistance, and put money in Singapore-style health savings accounts, that people can draw from for insurance payments or simple "cash" expenses. One of the things that are most clearly needed in the healthcare sector is direct consumer discipline, and HSAs provide that.

I think this actually points out a great common ground between the two notions this article is comparing.

If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while still empowering the recipient to make her own choices (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great melding of solutions.

Disagree completely. I too was in poverty and homelessness between the ages of 4 and 16. Those government programs (no matter how poorly managed) were critical to my survival. The whole reason why I support government programs today is because those programs helped me so much.

I have no doubt that they have helped some people, and I'm genuinely glad they helped you.

They unequivocally made my life worse off than without them, and I know I'm not alone.

Us both being willing to accept that our respective experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting it.

Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar that you're supporting today can't also harm others. Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't mean I should be closed off to the notion that something similar could help others.

If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual experiences of otherwise similar things can be very different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.

Sorry if I seemed to suggest that your perspective wasn't valid. I think your experience is a common one, and a lot of people agree with you. The tide is in your favor, in fact. I just hope people "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater".

I think that most pragmatic people understand that they have to do something to help the poor. Even the most callous people still understand that doing nothing may affect them negatively (unless, perhaps, they're rich enough to flee to New Zealand). The thing at issue is how much to give to the poor and how best to administer it.

Because I'm a success story, I will continue to support the programs that supported me. However, I would gladly welcome improvements that make those programs more effective and efficient.

I think it’s fair to say that in the US, the same program can be applied really well in one location and poorly in another place. This doesn’t mean that these programs are inherently bad - but does mean a lot of work needs to be done to reform how government delivers programs in places where they don’t perform well.

There’s a lot of scope for service design in government, and human-centered design. Of course, there are also lobbyists at every turn trying to hobble the process because there are profits to be made.

It would be amazing to see an America where its culture of innovation was laser focused on making life better for everyone. I wish we were there today.

My favorite example of the safety net not working is when my wife applied for unemployment, she was told she didn't make enough while she was employed to qualify for assistance. That's right, she was too poor to qualify for help.

Their solution? Go get a job and make more money, then she could qualify for unemployment. Gee thanks, I wish I had thought of that plan.

another lovely one is COBRA health insurance coverage after losing your job; you gain the privilege of both being out of work AND paying for health insurance out of your own pocket

This is not a fault with COBRA. Would you rather be out of work and have to negotiate new insurance as an individual? You're just paying the insurance premiums that used to be covered by your employer.

Hasn't COBRA more-or-less been obviated by the ACA rules on pre-existing conditions anyway? The only people I know who used COBRA in the past did so because there was a family member who was essentially uninsurable on an individual basis.

No? The healthcare.gov options with similar benefits to an employer plan are more expensive than what the employer was paying, so it often makes sense to keep the COBRA option.

Source: Did.

It may not be the same in every state but when I compared my COBRA offering (pretty good healthcare) to a matching plan on the ACA the COBRA program was almost $500 cheaper per month. I was on exchange insurance between jobs as a consultant and I paid $750/mo for bronze tier "only if you're dying" insurance.

The ACA plans I had available were only slightly less expensive than my COBRA, but there was not a single ACA plan available that would cover any out of network expense like my COBRA plan did. I did switch to an ACA plan after COBRA expired and it was fine, but I slightly preferred my COBRA plan.

it’s a shit solution to a monumental problem

> Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference if done in the right balance and the right way.

They can be done the right way, but aren't because politicians deliberately sabotage them. Every confusing and unnecessary form that is put in the way of getting assistance is put there deliberately to make the institution less effective and punish the people who need it. This is not an accident or some emergent, inevitable quality of government. It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor people. We DO have a handful of institutions that are still competent and effective. This also is not an accident--they're the ones not being deliberately hamstrung by Congress.

The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.

> It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor people.

That's the fun thing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both! And I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault given its obviously lacking transparency, and a "libertarian" response is all the more appropriate.

> I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault [...]

This is the weirdest argument. I mean, you seem to be arguing for some kind of government that's not answerable to elected leaders or voters? I mean, how else would you be able to run a program that couldn't be shut down by the leadership of an organization - public or private?

Shutting a program down is transparent. What GP said was that ineffective government programs, and red tape more generally, are uniformly due to some sort of devious intentional sabotage by the other side. My argument was a response to that.

Yes, I can read. Your argument is nonsensical.

Would you please stop breaking the guidelines so we don't have to ban you again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.

This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up. Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to only know what they knew about poverty and assistance programs from magazines, research journals and politicians selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who experienced the consequences of what they were advocating for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.

If it's true that these programs can be done the right way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of these initiatives in my life have come directly from undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us that "we can't afford not to go all in".

But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make it through via unchallenged bills or executive action, somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to double down."

Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame the victim, if you know how to spot it.

I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the assertion that many of these institutions are designed to fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually solving problems, that taking honest account of how these institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.

Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond words.

Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine personal experience that you may not have had. That those people, still in need of solutions not being provided by either team, are turning to the devil they know and can manage, rather than the one they cannot.

The good news is that these first steps are unifying and results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides is harder than it seems.