Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

If the social workers could help everyone that came to them deserving help they wouldn't be depressed in the first place.

Unfortunately, the elected officials in charge of changing the rules can get more votes by talking about other wedge issues. Worse, some of them can even get votes by peddling the myth that the poor are the ones responsible for bleeding the working class dry. This is often accompanied by a "fix" that costs more than it saves, makes life even harder for those at the bottom, and sometimes even funnels money back into the party / official's pocket (e.g. the urine test performed by a company owned by the official's wife).

It's voters that need to change, not social workers.

View on HN

Well, I think you were to take a look at the budgets... you would find that there is enough money. At least up here in Canada.

You need to spend your budget or you get less money. And frankly, some departments should recieve less if they come in under.

The problem is that the people who do an incompetent job and/or give out grants via patronage. They never really operating a competive service The over head is just disgusting.

You cannot fire the incompetent or the amoral. There is lots of fat to cut in these organizations. I know people that start out working hard on cases but then are nerfed to keep others from looking bad.

Hell I even offered to teach a google alert class for job seekers and the department free of charge. Did they do it... nah duplication of effort keeps their budget high and their employment stable.

If you think of these govt agencies as employment-welfare themselves, makework jobs with a false veneer of productivity, it begins to make sense. The bureaucracy is the actual welfare program.

I don't think that was ever the intent, although I do know a handful of conservatives who swear up and down that it was all part of the liberal agenda.

I always thought a much more plausible explanation was simply the accountability gap in public policy. The voters don't care if a policy works or not, they care if it sounds like it works according to their preconceived notions about how society functions (e.g. charging people to ride the bus will save money). Analyzing policy is a difficult and thankless task. It's hard to do right and voters don't pay attention anyway.

My suggestion: give each candidate 1/2 (or 1/3 or 1/4) of a ballot page to use as they please (with caveats on sourcing data). Let the infographic battles begin! It's not a perfect solution, but I think that it could do a great deal to steer the debate back in the correct direction: the post-mortem debunkings would likely be more socially productive than any immediate effect the graphics had on voter behavior.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Honestly, I think of it as embezzlement via black hat bureaucracy. It is just theft with with virtually no consequences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com