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Comment by OldManRyan | Hacker News Reader

I was talking about this book with a friend and they worked for the state qualifying people for government benefits. Think food stamps, welfare, etc etc. They said their job was a bullshit job. Why? Their reasoning was if you eliminated all the people who have to qualify people for benefits and just gave benefits to anyone who applied, you would end up spending less time and money.

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They're neglecting the fact that if you eliminated the checks, a lot more people would apply for benefits (and you would have to deal with much more fraud - look at the COVID relief fraud which had fairly little supervision). Induced demand, if you will.

It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching people bringing things through at airports, but their mere presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people trying funky things.

You can't compare this to COVID loan fraud. Those are apples and oranges. COVID relief loans had requirements but the watchdog that was meant to oversee it was rendered toothless. In this situation the only chance of you fraud is someone applying as someone else and you handle that the same way you handle all identity fraud.

This is why Universal Income makes sense. There can be no cheating if everyone is eligible.

To put things in perspective, the various federal and state welfare agencies in Australia employ something like 200K bureaucrats to allocate and monitor welfare handouts.

If they were all made redundant, the money saved would add a significant amount to the available welfare budget.

I worked as a consultant at several of these agencies and I can assure you that most of the jobs there were bullshit.

One coworker described these places as “daycare for adults”.

Means-testing is often presented as a way to ration limited resources. However, it is rarely considered how expensive the means-testing process actually is. Rather, it's just about satisfying vibes or excluding certain groups of undesirable people (without saying so outright).

One welfare queen among thousands of recipients making the news is enough to make people who are sacrificing their time working angry and raise pitchforks.

So ... UBI

This would just cause more people to apply.

The point is the increase in spending due to both more applicants and all applicants succeeding in getting the support would be less than the reduction in spending on the being of them. This is very likely true marginally in most benefits systems: there's a bias towards avoiding any case of someone getting an "undeserved" benefit, because this is politically unpopular, even though the system will spend more money than the benefit costs to make sure that rejection happens (not to mention the additional cost to society of the incorrect rejections: ironically the more admin overhead you add to getting benefits the less accurate it becomes, as people who do not have the time or capability to navigate the bureaucracy drop out despite meeting the requirements, but those exploiting the system jave all the time in the world to find the cracks).

(The UK has a particularly extreme version of this: the benefits department is hellbent on rejecting as many applicants as possible, and they lose a huge amount of court cases because of it, at great cost to the taxpayer and the lives of those affected)

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