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Also note that a lot of these government programs come with some amount of bureaucratic entanglement, where the person needs to fill out a bunch of forms repeatedly, visit government offices, be scrutinized by the government, and so on, all of which can detract from their efforts to better themselves and find employment.

Separate thought: with so much focus on the oppressed and downtrodden in our politics these days, how is it that obvious problems like the parent commenter mentions are not being fixed?

Why aren't reasonable people of both parties trying to create the right incentive structures for the poor at least in areas where they both agree?

All it takes is 10 people to wreck everything right now. And those people think that making society more fragile and cutthroat will somehow make us more moral, and in turn, more prosperous.

We're more divided than ever, and those ~10 people in the larger legislative chamber of the US Federal government will metaphorically kick and scream and whinge as they try to hold the entire country hostage... and the other ~210 who happen to claim to be in the same political party will let them out of a desire to keep some illusion of control they don't have, rather than compromise at all and work for the benefit of everyone.

I think the 210 can rightly point to over a decade of compromising, and they can make a pretty compelling case that every compromise led to more extreme and dangerous behavior from that small minority. I say this as someone who supported this compromises and now deeply regrets it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_debt-ceil...

Could we label these groups we're talking about? I think you're replying to someone talking about the GOP in the House but you appear to be referring to the Dems in the House.

You are absolutely right. I read this as an appeal to the Democrats to “compromise” rather than the much more straightforward approach where some number of the GOP just agree to unilaterally shut this madness down. It was the word “compromise” that tripped me up.

> Also note that a lot of these government programs come with some amount of bureaucratic entanglement, where the person needs to fill out a bunch of forms repeatedly, visit government offices, be scrutinized by the government, and so on, all of which can detract from their efforts to better themselves and find employment.

That's because these programs start with idea of having societal benefits but eventually persist to serve themselves (and the people they employ). Elevating people out of your program makes the peogram less necessary (along with the voters it employs).

The Government Program Industrial Complex, if you will.

Middle class politics would make you think that it was ideal to have an upper and lower class to complement it.

These programs are the result of compromises. One side says the programs aren't generous enough, the other says benefits go to people who don't deserve them.

The compromise between those two ideas is what we have today.

Unfortunately it’s a terrible and unintelligent compromise that is worse than many possible other compromises. It’s almost intentionally dysfunctional.

Here is a crazy but real story. At one point in Canada I had a friend who worked under the table in one of the larger metropolitan areas. He was making just a tiny amount each month basically being a waiter at a local watering hole and always had a hard time making ends meet. So one day I started talking with him about why he didn't want to apply for welfare, or some other benefit etc -- remember this is Canada, which has a bunch of social safety nets.

His thinking was that he didn't have a birth certificate, had no idea where it was, and he was WORRIED that if he brought this to the government's attention he could be declared a "non-citizen" and might be...well..he didn't really know. He was very fearful of this.

Eventually he found a girlfriend who was a friend of mine and we convinced him to sort out the situation and everything worked out just fine (he was obviously NOT the first person in Canada with this situation). But imagine he had gone for all these years avoiding the government just because of this line of thinking. So there is something to your point here about the fear of bureaucracy and scrutinization.

Where do you think this fear of bureaucracy comes from? It comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time these people have any contact with government institutions they wind up getting screwed.

Fear of the unknown off the top of my head, and the fact that governments have "unimaginable" powers (true or not) from the perspective of someone in his position who is kind of "hiding out" from the system...

...he did not have enough contact / experience with government entities to really know if he would get "screwed" or not.

>how is it that obvious problems like the parent commenter mentions are not being fixed?

Because if the problem goes away those people won't have reasons to vote for you next time around. LBJ has some rather crude quotes about this concept, it's not a new thing.

Yes. Unfortunately the US has an extremely terrible history with disabled people. People had to lay in front of busses to get accommodation to be able to ride them. These cliffs are purposely used to to maximize labor, not to make sure people are taken care of. They use the negative psychological effect of being poor to force you to figure out a way to increase your labor output. And of course, this is all bipartisan, not even considered wrong among our representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

thank you, this is interesting.

Agreed, "Welfare Cliffs" seem extremely suspect. It seems ideal if all Welfare were based on Gradient scales, where earning $10K more would ease off benefits, by like -$20 Welfare per +$100 Earned

It doesn’t need to be so complicated. Make it so that there is a target benefit. Every dollar of real earnings subtracts one dollar of assistance. Maintains the incentive to continually earn more where possible.

Can you clarify? What you propose sounds to me like a huge disincentive to work.

If you’re receiving $1234/month (typical disability payment from a few years ago), that works out to $14808 annually. Under your scheme, you’d have to find (and work) a job paying $14809/year just to see an increase of $1 in your real income. In effect, you’d be working for a full year and being paid a net of $1.

Well, it is predicated on the idea that more money is always better. Most of the assistance programs provide enough to stay alive with limited funds for anything else. Presumably, any job worth working is going to offer compensation significantly better than remaining idle and collecting checks. That is, in the provided pathological example, I would suggest the worker not take that job opportunity.

It is more about ensuring that a person receiving assistance can work as much as they are able without any concerns. Anything less than a totally smooth off-ramp to financial assistance is bound to create scenarios where the optimal strategy for a worker is limit their maximum compensation below the arbitrary financial cliff.

There's another issue though: people on disability payments often have disabilities that prevent them from working full-time. So in order for them to climb over the financial cliff they've got to find a part-time job that pays a lot more than what they receive from the government. That's a much more difficult obstacle and it keeps people from otherwise taking a low-paying, non-physically-taxing part-time job to earn a bit of extra income. It makes no economic sense.

>So in order for them to climb over the financial cliff they've got to find a part-time job that pays a lot more than what they receive from the government. >that pays a lot more The ideal is, without "Welfare Cliffs", they could find work that pays a BIT more, and lose a SLIVER of welfare, thus making the effort still worth it.

This is absolutely sensible and also impossible for the patchwork of systems that an individual has to navigate. These systems would have to talk to eachother, and they don’t.

That’s why I’m in favor of a straight cash subsidy through the negative income tax.

An example of this is the ACA subsidy cliff, which is now suspended through 2025.[1]

[1]: https://thefinancebuff.com/stay-under-obamacare-premium-subs...

Part of the political cost of the social security acts that gave us modern social services in the 1960s were a few measures that basically destroyed the family unit in poor families. Basically you can’t get most benefits if there are two parents in a household.

That created an obvious incentive for male behavior in poor families. Once the unattached male hits bottom, there’s three options: mooch off of parents/baby mama and get in your feet, mooch and do nothing, get on disability, or go to jail.