All the current results were foretold by people screeching warnings about them 50+yr ago.
> deeper and more systemic.
Nobody's budget ever got bigger or headcount grew or government contract got more lucrative because people got off welfare.
There are few things more evil in our society than the breed of conservative that will talk about how their family needed social welfare growing up to survive, how it worked and they did survive, but how "ashamed" they feel so they thing we should tear everything down and remove the ladder now that they've climbed it.
In fact, we have disincentives like that because they were arguing that having a flat benefit for everyone would be socialism.
If you don't reduce benefit with income level, these disincentives vanishes and that's how all post-war systems worked in Europe (can't talk about the US) before the neoliberal crew started dismantling everything in the name of “reducing public spendings” for greater economic efficiency.
For the non-income version see countries with free schools or free hospital, and for an example of an income benefit see the French Allocation familiales, which until 2015 were given to every family with 2 child or more no matter the parents income.
There were plenty of such systems, and some of them still exist (AFAIK the US social security is one of those, you don't lose access to the benefits even if you're rich)
This exactly.
> but in your original post you wrote about "a flat benefit for everyone" that doesn't reduce with income level
Yeah, my writing was confusing. By “for everyone” I meant “no matter the income”, not that we should give children's allowance to single adults. Just that we stop index these things on income. By the way I also think we should give more in nature (“the medical operation is free”), and less in cash, but that's independent.
Their thinking is that poor people are poor, which is bad. So let's check if they're poor, and give them money so they're not poor anymore, which is good. That feels right. Let's do that.
Negative income tax? But that gives rich people money too! Giving rich people money is bad because they're rich already. QED.