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Comment by mjmahone17 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.

I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all. Everyone who is currently able to can all just pay a bit more in taxes to cover everyone’s accessibility and aid needs. I don’t want it to be possible for a child’s needs not to be met just because the state thinks the child’s family has too much money.

Aid services should be treated like sidewalks and fire departments: almost everyone is going to need them at some point, why would you want to make it difficult to access?

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> I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all.

Beautifully summed up.

I don't want people to have to impoverish themselves, burning through entire life savings, to 'qualify' for small assistance. IME, it reinforces a 'why bother trying' attitude amongst people struggling on the lower end, and reinforces an 'I got mine, I'll protect it at all costs' attitude from people who've managed to save more.

Money saved from reducing means-testing from the administration of benefits/services might not be massive, but it would be a move towards "more efficiency", something many folks claim to value/support.

I don't really see that working. The rich might use the government benefits to the extent they exist, but they will always have the option of paying more privately, or buying additional private insurance, etc.

You see this every day in public school, where the more well-off families pay for math tutors or extra coaching or other out-of-school opportunities for their kids.

That's the point though. The rich already have all the benefits, plus more, but we also make the poor spend a lot of time, money, effort, and stress on "proving" they are poor to get the baseline benefits just so the rich "can't" use them (even though the truly rich have access to better and more services). If the rich already have plenty of access to stuff why are we forcing the poor to go through all these extra "proof" steps? Of course, rich people will cheat and take the 'free stuff" too (because they can, because many of them penny pinch too). So why not just make it for everyone and avoid all the tests and stress and administrative overhead of "prove you are poor to get this service"?

(A very similar thing applies to things like public school "free lunch" programs. The poor have to do a bunch of paperwork to qualify every year and lots of real poor people fall through the cracks of the system because they miss the paperwork or get some small detail wrong. The rich are generally going to pack better, healthier lunches anyway, so in some cases the time and cost of that paperwork would be better spent on "free lunch for all" programs, even if that means a few rich kids get free lunch sometimes.)

Unfortunately, the desire to soak the rich is a thing.

(A sentence that is not seen very often.)

Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.

> The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.

But it does though, because those are the people the existing system is screwing the most.

If you're all the way at the bottom, whatever the government provides is what you get because you have nothing else.

If you're all the way at the top, you have the resources to buy whatever the best of the best is.

But if you're in the middle, you can't afford to pay the taxes to fund public schools you don't use and pay for private schools, so you get stuck with public schools. And then we end up with this catastrophic districting system where you buy into a better public school system by spending more money on housing -- and making sure that there is more political support for keeping housing unaffordable because it's the way the middle class gets their kids into a better school district.

If you just give everyone the same amount of money, someone at the 40th percentile income doesn't have to massively overpay for a house, they can just add 20% more of their own money to send their kids to a better school. And someone at the 25th percentile income who is willing to sacrifice more for their kids can do the same thing, instead of having no path to do it at all because it would require them to get mortgage approval for a single family house in a suburban school district which is forbidden at their income level.

Given that children are our future, making sure all of them get a good healthy nutritious lunch behoovs us all. Even the not destitute, and not wealthy ones. If we have to have fewer stealth bombers and aircraft carriers to pay for that, then so be it. But of course trading one for another in order to be able to afford it makes sense if you think of the whole of the US economy as a one househole, with no control over monetary policy like the interest rate. Except it isn't. Look at how willingly spending is increased on military projects, and not the projects themselves. If we wanted to have the money to pay for it, we could.

It's just this idea that someone undeserving might get something for free. This makes sense for adults, but children, for whom we have laws preventing them from having jobs, can't have jobs.

Don't buy into the idea we don't have the money to pay for it, we do. Monetary policy allows us to create money out of thin air. If we treated this like the emergency it is, we could afford it. We don't do it for other reasons, but it's not a money thing.

> Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them

Welcome to the squeezed middle. Don't make enough to be truly comfortable but too much to be eligible for government assistance.

> and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.

Though if we had a functional legislature we could make this money exist simply by bumping the tax rate in the relevant income bands so that the extra expenditure is covered by the higher taxes.

Not to mention means testing can be used for discrimination

Growing up one thing I realized was white privilege, for lack of a better term, was my families access to welfare programs.

My father passed when I was young and my mom was left to raise us on our own. When he passed she made just barely above the poverty level, and you know what the government agent did? He fudged a couple things on the paper work and my mom got SSI and Medicaid for us until we turned 18.

I’ve heard the hell non white families go through in similar situations in my home state and I don’t imagine they got that privilege

At very least, it'd be nice if the means tests were tied to inflation rather than being increased based on congressional whims.

I'm certainly pro universal health care, it would GREATLY simplify mine and my son's life. Private insurance is simply garbage when it comes to services for people with disabilities. With that in place, a much simpler trust system would work for my kid. It wouldn't be this complex system of checks to make sure they stick in line with current legislation standards. I wouldn't have to spend a large chunk of my child's funds on lawyers and trust administrators just to ensure legal compliance. I could cover basically all my kids needs other than medical, that stuff is just too expensive for anyone to afford.

Exactly - universality is why Social Security and Medicare haven't been politically destroyed (yet) and remain the most popular public programs in the history of the US.

Means testing is not only inimical to the concept of shared benefits, but it's actually expensive to perform the means-testing. And some people who should qualify don't get the benefits.

> I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.

This was an argument for "libertarian" universal income.

Huge government edifice which exists to determine who, where, and how aid is distributed. Much glad-handing, acrimony, and inefficiency.

Just cut out the middle-man and cut everyone a check, or implement something like Richard Nixon almost did, the reverse income tax.

The issue with Univeral income is it's easy to dismantle or not fund.

Let's say we set the level at $1k per month for everyone. Great, until it's 2050 and that level is still $1k. Without inflation adjustments it eventually turns into giving people the equivalent of a penny, only now there aren't other safety nets in place.

But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.

> The issue with Univeral income is it's easy to dismantle or not fund.

Completely the opposite. Because everyone gets it, lowering the funding requires you to fight everyone. The average income is moderately higher than median income, so the median person (i.e. the majority) receives more than they pay, even if it's funded with a flat tax. (Which also allows you to vastly simplify the tax system, because flat tax + UBI is progressive but requires much less privacy-invasive financial tracking than other forms of progressive taxation.)

> Let's say we set the level at $1k per month for everyone. Great, until it's 2050 and that level is still $1k.

So index it to inflation, or better yet, GDP per capita.

> But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.

They only get away with that because the people born in 2023 wouldn't have received SS until ~2088, which doesn't concern their parents, and the infants are too young to put up any resistance.

With a UBI, everyone gets it, and then every parent will object that they're cutting funding for children.

>But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.

Yes, one of the most important parts of making a healthy, empathetic, caring, and functional society is removing those people from office.

> I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs.

The problem isn't the means testing the problem is it's applied with broad strokes like all well meaning but inevitably awful government work. First, everyone pays into disability. So everyone should be able to get their share when necessary. Second, means testing includes things like housing, retirement accounts (which will be penalized severely if accessed), assets, and other things than just raw cash available. Just having a half decent computer is enough to make you fail means testing. So people who are on disability are almost universally forced to be poor. Don't try to hide your assets either. Shifting money/assets/etc to a family memory will still disqualify you.

In a practical sense we also need to prevent the exploitation of disability programs. For example, self-inflicted disability (morbid obesity for example) should be subject to a different test of means than birth defects. If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled. Every "class" of disability is not equal and so we shouldn't treat them exactly the same. But, like all things, because the government runs it disabilities must be treated this way and as a result everyone suffers.

Something my therapist pointed out to me is that obesity is directly linked to childhood and intergenerational trauma; calling it self-inflicted is not accurate. Even if we're focused on healthy eating, food deserts exist. No man is an island, &c.

Also, to cite an HN darling[0], obesity is, at the very least, a lot stranger and more complicated than CICO.

> we also need to prevent the exploitation of disability programs

What if we _encouraged_ the "exploitation" of disability programs? What if everyone who wanted or needed it got help, regardless of whether someone thinks they "deserve" it? What if people didn't have to worry about failing to re-prove they still need help? I would rather that myself & my disabled friends live in that world.

[0]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/

> Something my therapist pointed out to me is that obesity is directly linked to childhood and intergenerational trauma; calling it self-inflicted is not accurate. Even if we're focused on healthy eating, food deserts exist. No man is an island, &c.

The idea that obesity is self inflicted runs contrary to our current understanding not just of psychology but of physiology. Most people don't have a constant struggle to maintain a healthy weight generally people with obesity even if they lose weight have to work extremely hard to not regain that weight and most fail.

> The idea that obesity is self inflicted runs contrary to our current understanding not just of psychology but of physiology.

Eating your feelings (emotional eating) is commonplace. I'm saying it's a uniform cause, but common enough to pass the bar of "contrary to current understanding of psychology".

i'm late replying but i'd argue that emotional eating isn't entirely self inflicted. It's partially biological (our bodies naturally crave higher calorie foods during times of stress), partially down to learned behaviours that you may not be able to break without outside help.

> What if everyone who wanted or needed it got help

That's always the ideal surely. But there are at least some cases where simply providing people with material necessities and access to medical care etc. doesn't always feel like it's really helping them - I have one such friend, and while I genuinely sympathise with his very real mental illnesses, it's hard not to think sometimes the fact there's no expectation he will ever need to provide for himself at all might be part of what's stopping him turning his life around.

> calling it self-inflicted is not accurate

Controlling the motion of your hand to your mouth is entirely within the powers of even amoeba. No one forced you to eat yourself to death.

It's strange how we are so tolerant of the obese but alcoholics who climb into a bottle because of PTSD are considered derelicts. "Healthy at any size" has been the most effective form of long term population control.

> For example, self-inflicted disability (morbid obesity for example) should be subject to a different test of means than birth defects.

I don't really agree with this.

First, I don't see "abuse" of the system being a major problem that needs to be defended against. If someone wants to destroy their future health by Homering, let 'em. They aren't extending their life by eating themselves to death.

But even if that's the concern, I'm pretty sure we could circumvent a lot of those issues simply by subsidizing disability causing conditions (such as building/maintaining public gyms). We can prevent people from getting there in the first place which would greatly reduce the problem of "abuse".

Strong means tests are expensive to run and ultimately will filter out people that actually need assistance. If we are going to apply a social filter, I'd rather side with letting those that don't deserve it in than keeping those that deserve it out.

This is born out with homelessness studies. Applying sobriety or religious tests before sheltering the homeless ultimately keeps people homeless. Housing first, on the other hand, has a tendency to make people sober.

The dreaded “welfare queen” trope has cost so many lives, so much misery. We’d rather countless needy people suffer than dare give someone else more than he/she is due.

Yup. I support expensive social programs with minimal means testing. I'd rather give every kid a school lunch on my tax dime than have kids go hungry because their parents weren't poor enough to get a free meal. The wealthy kids parents are already subsidizing meals so why not let them have a free meal as well?

It's silly to bill people twice for the same product to make sure the underserved aren't accidently helped.

> First, I don't see "abuse" of the system being a major problem that needs to be defended against. If someone wants to destroy their future health by Homering, let 'em. They aren't extending their life by eating themselves to death.

Absolutely. No one should have to pay for it, though.

> everyone pays into disability. So everyone should be able to get their share when necessary

That's not how insurance works. Everyone pays with the expectation that few will need it.

Everyone gets disabled to one degree or another as one gets older.

So what we have is a Ponzi scheme, where early participants get benefits but the majority get screwed.

> Every "class" of disability is not equal and so we shouldn't treat them exactly the same

Agree 100%. You should be expected to take care of yourself if you can.

> If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled.

Okay... how do you then prove this? Is preexisting medical issues considered legitimate? What about medication changes? What about [insert any of many possible causes]? What if you have one of those causes but are missing one piece of paperwork to prove it? What if what if what if? I worry that trying to put legitimacy tests on disability just leads to "you're not disabled enough to deserve health" the way it does now.

> If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled.

Perhaps there's a distinction between chronic/permanent disabilities and transient disabilities? If I'm obese to the point where I can't walk, I am, indeed, disabled, but don't necessarily have to be for the next 20 years. Diet/exercise/surgery/etc could all reduce the obesity, but in the immediate 'now', I'm disabled and need assistance.

There's a reason you have to requalify every three years.

Well there you go. I’m not intimately versed in the specifics. Thanks for clarifying.

> Every "class" of disability is not equal and so we shouldn't treat them exactly the same.

You're making the argument for this dystopia:

https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

The point of government assistance isn't to make everyone the same, it's to provide a baseline. Someone in such a poor state that they can't work at all still gets a roof over their head.

Someone else can use the money to go to college or start a business, and society has an interest in promoting that because it yields returns. There is even an argument for investing more in people with more potential.

But in both cases the government is terrible at doing the evaluation as a result of politics and bureaucracy, so the right answer is for everyone to get the same.

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