Have you ever accompanied a poor or disabled person to a county assistance office to see what the forms or process entails?
Do you know how SNAP or WIC works?
I never said "all".
Some years back, and acquaintance of mine detailed how he gamed the system. He'd work until he met the minimum number of employed weeks to qualify for unemployment, then he'd do a lousy job so he'd get laid off. He'd then go on unemployment. Being unemployed required him to look for a job, so he'd look for a job, and flunk the job interview. When the unemployment compensation ran out, then he'd get a job again. Over and over and over.
BTW, when he was "unemployed", he'd take off-the-books jobs.
A businessman acquaintance told me how he'd found some well qualified people he wanted to hire. They said they'd take the job, but only after their unemployment compensation ran out.
The Seattle Times ran an article a couple decades ago (wish I'd saved it) where they went around interviewing people on welfare. They'd ask "what would you do if the welfare was cut off?" The answer was "get a job." They interviewed people in a car with fishing gear. "Where are you going?" "Fishing" "Don't you have jobs?" "No, we get welfare." "Wouldn't you rather have a job?" "No, we'd rather go fishing."
Sure, there are people who should be on welfare. But there are a lot of people gaming it.
Every government program designed to hand out money if specific requirements are met results in companies and individuals springing up to game it.
That way someone who used aid and becomes wealthy would pay into it in the future. Right now our systems more or less just keep you where you are.
"For every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud (via a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service). Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been overpaid due to recipient fraud.
To put this into perspective, the IRS estimates that for every $6 owed in federal taxes, $1 is not paid because of tax evasion or fraud."
Well, except the off-the-books job.
Fraud as defined by these authors is very rare. They are not talking about what the average person is when they talk about common welfare fraud. These studies mean outright fraud, not someone able body choosing to game the system instead of working.
If you changed the definition to match the collequal understanding of fraud your results would not be a number literally everyone who lives in neighborhoods where benefit recipients are the majority laughs at when told.
It's like saying the PPP program had very little outright fraud. True. But in my mind, you committed fraud if you took the money and didn't actually end up truly needing it for it's intended purpose. Most share my definition. Under that definition I'd posit the vast majority of PPP recipients participatated in fraud, but it will never show up in the studies or numbers.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time actually living within these communities understands the situation with benefits looks pretty much like the situation with PPP writ large.
If you'd like to sanity-check your recollections, try to figure out what the people in question would be eligible for, and try to figure out what it would actually cost to live in Seattle.
I will point out the number of politicians who were shocked, shocked when they went to backdoor COVID relief through the unemployment system, and found that most state systems were deliberately neglected to the point of abject dysfunction, or had erected punitive gating systems that defeated most applicants.
Believe whatever you need to. But consider this:
People are fundamentally selfish. Building a system that assumes general altruistic behavior is not going to work very well. Assuming people will not take advantage of rules for their personal benefit is naive.
Consider politicians. Have you ever noticed that people tend to go into Congress as middle class people and come out wealthy? How do you think that happens? Altruism?
How many people offered student loan forgiveness will say "no thanks, I borrowed the money, I'll pay it back!"?
The people I mentioned were not breaking the law. But they were taking advantage of it.
If you're one of the few people in the world doing well enough to be paying into a system rather than relying on one, thank your lucky stars for how blessed you are. Ultimately, nobody on their deathbed contemplating their life cares about who their taxes were spent on.
If you simply must be mad at someone getting government handouts without need, there's a big list of companies who use accounting tricks to pay no taxes and even get subsidies from the government. You're probably better off being mad at them than some guy who's figured out how to go fishing while collecting unemployment.
I remember when the unit at the company I worked for decided to put a big graph of the bug count on the wall, and announced incentives for retiring bug reports. Within a week, the entire unit had devolved into knock-down drag out fights over who had solved a bug, if a bug was really a bug, if a bug was actually 3 bugs and the person should get 3 credits for solving it, people filing fake bug reports and then "fixing" them, etc. A couple more weeks of that and the graph was taken down and the incentive program terminated. These were intelligent, well-educated people, going berserk.
There was another case where the company got a big contract from IBM, and hired some mercenary contractors to fulfill it. Part of the deal was each mercenary got a $10,000 bonus (worth about $30,000 today) for getting it done on time. I'm sure you know what happened. It shipped the day before the deadline.
I asked one of them, "did the bonus get you to finish on time?" The response, "absolutely not, it had nothing to do with it. We're professionals!"
70% (approximately) of people on welfare already have a job. That's strange isn't it? Not going fishing. Not living the life working under the table. No, doing the hard jobs you expect to be done for next to nothing, for your comfort and convenience. They clean your hotel rooms, wait on you at restaurants and check you out at your local Walmart that destroyed all the other work in their town, and then paid them so little they had to apply for help to feed their children. These vital jobs that people expected to be done even in the middle of a pandemic, well they don't pay enough to live off of anymore. Because the wealth only moves in one direction and has for decades.
Welfare the majority of the time is a hand up not a hand out, 50% of recipients are able to get off of it inside of a year, 70% inside of 2 years and if we should have a few people who game the system, oh well. It's a necessary evil to make sure women and children are not on the streets, to ensure that once you are down you are not out, because we are the most prosperous nation on earth and we can EASILY afford it, and part of the social contact entailed in being an American is you care for your fellow Americans. Unless you are someone who sits around ruminating about what an injustice it is that a portion of your income is used to keep children from being hungry and how very unfair that is to you.
I pay more than what I am asked in taxes, I contribute to charities at a rate that most people would be surprised by, and I can tell you this. Every charity in our country is a failure of our government. Every church that proselytizes via helping the poor does so because the system we built is not working for it's constituents, and myopic people want to spend a bunch of time fighting about who gets what of the very, very thin slice of the pie, instead of actually doing the hard work of reforming the bakery. If there is any truth to your anecdotes at all consider this; it might be more telling of you and the moral fibre of those you surround yourself with than people at large.
What happened in 1968? Johnson's Great Society program.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
It’s much lower after adjusting for social benefits.
Right, and it stopped going down.