I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go a few hundred dollars over, so I called out of a few shifts and nearly got fired over it. I barely squeaked in under the limit, and if I hadn't, there was pretty much no way I would have been able to continue school. It's not like I could suddenly afford it now that I made $35,001 vs $34,999. I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line.
Something seems very off with that image. I've known a lot of different people who were on welfare over the years, and not one of them had a standard of living anywhere close to what someone who nets $60,000 a year does. That said, there is absolutely a cliff where you could risk a loss just by taking in more money.
The ones I've known with kids all seem to have it far worse. If they were getting a $16k tax credit or whatever it must not have been making up for the other costs involved with raising children.
> The ones I've known with kids all seem to have it far worse. If they were getting a $16k tax credit or whatever it must not have been making up for the other costs involved with raising children.
Worse than someone who doesn't have to pay raise a kid isn't the same thing as worse than someone else with kids who makes $8000 more and therefore loses the $16,000 credit.
And the cliffs are only half the problem. Did you get a childcare subsidy? Only if you use approved providers, which charge more than your older niece would to watch the kids, and now the money goes to some bureaucratic corporation with lawyers and lobbyists instead of your own family, and you see your niece less often and don't talk to her dad as much and now he's less likely to offer to do you a favor when you need one or realize that you do.
You also get a housing subsidy, but only for particular housing, which isn't as close to your job or doesn't allow you to pool resources with roommates, so now you have to pay more for transportation or most of the subsidy gets eaten by higher rents etc.
The entire welfare system should be vaporized and replaced with a tax credit for the poor (i.e. a UBI).
The problem with UBI isn't so much the politics, it's the feasibility of the cost. $12k a year over 300 million people is 80% of the US government's tax revenue.
A negative income tax might work out a lot better on the numbers, but it won't help the people that need it the most (the ones that can't get a job).
But hey, maybe it can work. The US has a deficit spending of $1.7 trillion in 2023, $1.4 in 2022, $2.7 in 2021. That $1.7 would cover almost half of a $12k ubi. But how long could that last?
The cost is fiction because it's a tax credit. The money is on both sides of the ledger. If you're making $60,000/year and your pre-credit taxes go up by $12,000 and then you get a $12,000 tax credit, you have paid an additional zero dollars in taxes. If you don't make much money and the government used to pay you a net $10,000 in benefits and now you get a $12,000 UBI and pay $2000 in taxes, that hasn't actually cost any additional money, all it does is convert the needlessly inefficient constellation of benefits into cash.
The "universal" part of a UBI is serving the same purpose as the progressive rate structure in the income tax, i.e. you want an effective rate curve which is higher for the rich than the poor. Which means that you don't need both. What you use instead is a flat tax rate which serves as the de facto "phase out" for the UBI. Except that because it's all in one place, there are no cliffs, and there are no poor people paying higher de facto marginal rates than rich people, and there are no mountains of paperwork to apply for benefits.
> The cost is fiction because it's a tax credit. The money is on both sides of the ledger. If you're making $60,000/year and your pre-credit taxes go up by $12,000 and then you get a $12,000 tax credit, you have paid an additional zero dollars in taxes.
Most people miss that the 'money' will get spent. This should lead to an income multiplier. Then hopefully to a reallocation of resources moving bureaucrats from administrative work to something else.
(Fiscal) income multipliers don't really exist (ie they are one) in an economy with a competent central bank that targets eg inflation or nominal GDP.
If whatever fiscal policy you have makes overall nominal spending go up (or down), that would have an impact on inflation, so the central bank will remove money from circulation (or add money to circulation) to counteract.
Thus neutralising any multiplier, you might naively expect.
(Also keep in mind that when you don't tax some money, it also gets spend or invested etc.)
Which is exactly the point. What's the "marginal tax rate" on low and middle income people of the existing benefits phase outs?
The >100% marginal rates that create actual cliffs are so patently absurd that no one can look at them and find any way to justify it, but even when the combined tax+phase out rates are in the neighborhood of 80-90% of marginal income, that's still not what we want, is it?
1. The federal government doesn't have tax revenue. It issues a currency and then taxes go toward countering inflation. The notion that a currency-issuing government needs to "balance its budget" in its own currency is a political fiction. Also, policies that benefit people at the lower end of the income spectrum disproportionately actually move money around in the economy, which generally speaking is less inflationary than allowing it to accumulate in various silos like hedge funds
2. A "negative income tax" doesn't have to require employment. You can make zero dollars in income as a self-employed person, and the self-employed still track their income for taxation purposes
3. There are many unnecessary-to-malicious subsidies and inefficient welfare programs that could easily have their rationale subsumed by UBI, and doing so would save considerable cost that is mostly the overhead of all the means-testing personnel and in some cases (like SNAP) completely separate financial machinery necessary to maintain them
Even setting all that aside, you could make considerably more "tax revenue" by funding the IRS or reversing some of the nakedly corrupt corporate tax breaks that have been created over the last several decades. There always seems to be more money to subsidize artificially lowering the price of certain goods, fund incredibly inefficient private government contractors to do things that once cost considerably less for the government to do itself, fund drug research only to then allow the resulting breakthroughs to be patented by a private firm and then gouge people for treatment, or buy ludicrously expensive weapons for militarized police forces, but propose anything that actually benefits people and suddenly everyone's worried about the costs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but all this "Well have you considered the cost?" handwringing people do when UBI comes up just drastically misunderstands how governments use money, while claiming to be "responsible" and "realistic"
> you could make considerably more "tax revenue" by funding the IRS
The US government expenditure as percentage of GDP is now over one-third, as opposed to the pre-WW1 long-term average in the single digits. Keep in mind that massive infrastructure projects like the Transcontinental Railroad were able to be built in those single-digit percent times, or that US educational spending per pupil has been going up year after year for decades yet student achievement flatlined, and of recent years been trending down. Clearly, more tax revenue is neither necessary nor sufficient for the public good.
> reversing some of the nakedly corrupt corporate tax breaks
No arguments from me there.
> fund drug research only to then allow the resulting breakthroughs to be patented by a private firm and then gouge people for treatment
Fundamental research and bringing a drug to market are markedly different areas that require very different skills and incentives. An organization that is good at one is not necessarily good at the other. And this isn't confined to drug research; an architect can draw up plans for a house, but a family cannot live in a plan. Foundations need to be poured, chalk lines snapped, lumber nailed together, and plumbing and wires laid, all in the context of a competitive marketplace.
I attribute a lot of the higher expenditure and lower efficiency to the continued insistence that outsourcing to contractors, effectively picking winners in a "market" to give monopoly status, is a better way to provide government services. These firms have little if any accountability to the electorate, no incentive to set reasonable prices, get anything done efficiently, and in some cases don't even produce working services
Similarly, bringing a drug to market with a patent is not a competitive marketplace, by design, and it consistently creates an outcome wherein people are charged exorbitant sums of money because of this non-competitive market. Doing a bunch of government-backed R&D and then getting a patent for it is the government picking a winner, not creating a market
Basically, it seems like the government was and remains a lot more efficient when it directly builds the capacity to provide goods and services it determines to have an interest in providing, rather than try to do this through "the market" (again, this is almost never an actual market)
> outsourcing to contractors, effectively picking winners in a "market" to give monopoly status
In principle this is supposed to be a competitive bidding process, and then the winner is chosen by the most competitive bid rather than the government. In practice the process is corrupt and regulatory barriers are created to prevent smaller companies from submitting bids or project requirements are set such that only one company can satisfy them.
The problem here is corruption, which has nothing to do with whether the corrupting entity is a corporation. Public sector unions lobby for the same kind of labor-inefficient practices because they know that more jobs give them more members which give them more power, even (or especially) when the jobs are unnecessary or inefficient.
The advantage that existed pre-WWII is that neither large government contractors nor large public sector unions already existed in order to lobby for corrupt practices and their continued existence, so the government could just pay someone to do work and then have them to return to the private sector when the work is done. But WWII created such a large apparatus dependent on taxpayer revenue that it had enough lobbying power to sustain its continued existence, and now it needs to be disassembled before we can have nice things again.
But probably the best way to do it is under anti-corruption. You still want roads and ships to be built, but if you could get the corruption out of the bidding process then they'd be built by smaller and less consolidated companies with less individual lobbying power, and then you could address efficiency issues without having to fight a multi-billion dollar corporation or huge public sector union because that inefficiency is their profit margin/job. Another possibility would be anti-trust -- break the big government contractors up.
No, the problem would exist even if the bidding process was completely fair, because it still creates a situation where a long-standing project creates stable returns for a company while decoupling the service it provides from both market forces and public accountability. It is the worst of both worlds: shielded from market forces by having its customer be the government, providing a government service shielded from public accountability by the corporate veil
Yes, we should reduce corruption and break up existing entrenched players, but the core issue is in the structure of that kind of arrangement. I do also think that there's no good reason to have a "corporate veil" in the first place, but that's a broader problem
> it still creates a situation where a long-standing project creates stable returns for a company while decoupling the service it provides from both market forces and public accountability.
But that's just a mechanism for the corruption. The contract for the design of something and its manufacture and maintenance should each be separate bids. Even each stage of the design should be a separate contract that could go to someone else. The government says "we need a design for a ship" and they put it out to firms who submit their proposals and then the government picks one and buys it outright. Then they say "we need a design for a propulsion system for this ship" and take bids again. If you need to modify the ship's design some to facilitate it, that's fine, because none have been built yet and the necessary change gets incorporated into the design before you put out contracts to build any of it.
What you want is for each of the contracts to be as small as practicable, to maximize the number of potential bidders. None of this "single contract to design and build an entire fleet of ships and maintain them for 30 years" nonsense.
Yea, that does seem like a reasonable way to design less corrupt mechanisms for these processes, but I think the standard way piecemeal designs like that get rejected is by arguments to "efficiency" (Nevermind that efficiencies gained by bundling require some pretty strict discipline within a firm, mostly benefit the firm, and are easily dwarfed from the government's perspective by the inefficiencies taken on by the problem we're talking about)
That's the "monopolies are efficient" argument. Look, see, they can amortize their fixed costs over so many more units if they have the whole market.
Claims that you can increase the efficiency of a system by reducing competition should be met with the same level of skepticism as claims that you can violate of the second law of thermodynamics.
But let's try one that should get their ears to perk up. Monopoly suppliers are systemic risk, which is a threat to national security.
Your point (1) sounds like the same old 'modern monetary theory' that never amounted to anything. To quip, MMT is both novel and correct. It has both novel and correct parts (but no parts that are both).
Actually most of the money is created as debt. Lincoln and JFK both issued 'Green backs', money not created via debt issues. But neither lived too long
> You also get a housing subsidy, but only for particular housing, which isn't as close to your job or doesn't allow you to pool resources with roommates, so now you have to pay more for transportation or most of the subsidy gets eaten by higher rents etc.
Yeah the subsidies also will not cover the entire cost of housing. So you probably have to drive a lot farther than someone else who is not using welfare to pay for the same kind of housing.
A lot of welfare stuff looks like a great deal when you put an amount on it but completely falls apart when you look at how challenging it is to access and what the conditions are around continuing in the program. It gets to the degree that getting that extra $40-50k a year requires you to give up a LOT. And it's a full time job to maintain. So you have to do all of that on top of your full time job, often with agencies who have no hours after work. And god help you if you have to show up somewhere regularly to pick something up.
As a bonus nuking welfare and replacing it with UBI would help a lot of the chronically homeless because it would allow them to get assistance without needing to have a permanent physical address.
> It gets to the degree that getting that extra $40-50k a year requires you to give up a LOT.
And it's still costing the taxpayer ~$45k -- more than that, because the government has its own administrative overhead on top of that.
But people still use it, because they're doing $30k in work to get $45k in benefits, it's just that they were supposed to be getting $45k in benefits. Which the taxpayer is still paying for even though the net benefit is far less.
The people asking how to pay for it haven't understood the math. If you subtract both the government's administrative overhead and the recipient's, we could provide a higher level of true benefits to people and still lower taxes on everyone else, just by splitting the efficiency gains between them.
That graph is also showing an ideal situation—that is, you fully qualify for and fully receive all of the benefits listed.
That means you have to also know that you qualify for them, apply for them, prove that you qualify, oh, nope, whoops, you missed one piece of proof there—that means you have to start all over.
You have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify, jump through all the hoops, you start receiving benefits! Now it's time to apply for the next one, get the slightly different proofs together, send them all in—oh, what's that? someone gave you just enough money that you went over one of the limits? you get nothing this year!
A new year, you have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify....
In my cab driving days I hauled around a bunch of people to/from medical appointments and they talk on the phone a lot...
Some people are absolute experts at navigating the bureaucracy to the point I expect they know the rules better than the people that work at the various government agencies. It was quite impressive to be honest.
One example off the top of my head; this lady was talking on the phone with a friend (or whoever) explaining how their benefits would be impacted if they declared the father of the children resided in the household and how it was much better to just lie and claim to be a single mother.
No judgement from me as it was quite the education on governmental programs.
As an added bonus I also learned a bunch of methods on how to steal groceries from walmart since people are surprisingly candid on these things when they're just having a conversation with some random cab driver they probably won't ever see again.
If you've got the mental bandwidth and dedication to learn these kinds of things, it can be very impressive. This is obviously a much less dramatic example, but when my wife worked for a costume wholesaler over a decade ago, she had to learn how customs regulations worked in order to design costumes that would be able to be imported without the higher duty associated with "wearable garments", and by the time she left that job, she knew the regulations better than at least some of the customs agents she had to interact with.
I have great respect for people who can learn to navigate government bureaucracies well enough to avoid getting caught up on all the deliberate snares and thorns—all the moreso if they can do so while also being poor, working 3 jobs, raising kids as a single parent, etc.
> I have great respect for people who can learn to navigate government bureaucracies well enough to avoid getting caught up on all the deliberate snares and thorns—all the moreso if they can do so while also being poor, working 3 jobs, raising kids as a single parent, etc.
Yes, the latter is a very peculiar combination, because not many people with the mental skills required to navigate a bureaucracy like that stay poor (because some employers are willing to pay a lot for those skills).
Or to flip the statement: in order to fully benefit from the programs designed to help poor people, you need skills that few poor people have.
(Of course, this is all about averages and aggregates. There are certainly people who manage to be both poor and have the skills and mentality required to navigate the bureaucracy.)
My 'flipped' statement is one of the best arguments for a UBI-style simplification of means testing that I know of.
> Yes, the latter is a very peculiar combination, because not many people with the mental skills required to navigate a bureaucracy like that stay poor (because some employers are willing to pay a lot for those skills).
Whooo boy that's a lot of assumptions there.
Sorry, but it just doesn't hold up in practice. If you're working at McDonald's, your employer has very little interest in your ability to navigate a complex bureaucracy. Especially when the manager is the manager because he's the franchise owner's nephew.
Unfortunately, in most low-level jobs, that kind of skill—and, more importantly, the initiative required to obtain the skill—is not only not valued, it is punished.
I've seen a number of people I know who are very bright, very talented people stuck in low-end jobs for exactly those reasons. (Plus the good old standbys of "can't take time off to do job interviews, too exhausted each night to spend hours sending out applications", etc.)
So, are you going to go for that 14th job interview, or are you going to go spend four hours making sure you have childcare next month? Do you finish the online test, or do you fill out the form on the benefits website for the fifth time this month?
In my Midwestern area, infant care is ~$2000/month or more at a center and you get down to ~$1200 a month if you're at the right kind of center by age 4. So there are still some thousands to contribute to childcare even with $16k "off" and then that doesn't count diapers or clothes or formula (breastfeeding is great but you can't do it forever, some can't do it at all, and it is very hard to do on a practical level if you've got an hourly/service job).
What are you imagining the typical rate is in much of America. When we lived in the city we had a range of about 225 to 300 per week as of last year. Outside of the city we pay 160 per week.
Or maybe you value the consistency of full enrollment that comes with a waitlist over the additional revenue you could earn with higher prices. Could be the case if there are high costs to changing the size of the business.
Imagine there’s a law that you can only have 4 children per caregiver. Your capacity is 8. Lose one and your revenue is down 12.5%
You can't criticise free markets where there is no market, let alone a free one.
"Supply and demand" is not a free market claim, it is accepted by everyone.
I'm just pointing out that the NHS exchanges monetary cost with temporal cost - you're paying with your time rather than your dollars, for access. You're also paying dollars via tax, but that's unrelated to access.
A nation can accept or even demand this trade-off, and many do - but support tends to drop when it is made explicit.
How so? This doesn't have much to do with a free market.
The same applies if eg the government provides a service for a fee, or otherwise gates access to something. Eg H-1B visas to the US should arguably be auctioned off.
You are a lucky person. I just looked up my tax statements for 2022 and I paid $1341.67/month for an older kid (not infant). Waiting lists are atrocious and everywhere (and many places charge a $75-150 deposit for the waiting list alone); we got in fast because it was a new location. I am in the Midwest, not a coast.
The chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare - so take note the commenters who are trying to suggest this is libertarian propaganda.
> The chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare - so take note the commenters who are trying to suggest this is libertarian propaganda.
In fairness, the linked image is sourced to a libertarian's blog and Gary Alexander is also a conservative who was appointed to Corbett's administration and was often criticized for extensive cuts to Pennsylvania’s welfare programs which he characterized as fighting fraud and waste until he resigned after a few scandals (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2380594/ex-penns...) including the fact that he was still living in Rhode Island and was charging tax payers for his travel/commute expenses.
How much of that standard of living is based on credit, though? Credit is largely based on income. Housing, payment flexibility for amenities and vacations, big ticket purchases that reduce long-term costs, etc.
When 3/4 of those making less than 50k and 2/3 of those making less than 100k are living paycheck to paycheck, that extra flexibility influences quality of life quite a bit.
* Statistics vary, but between 55 percent to 63 percent of Americans are likely living paycheck to paycheck.
* Three in four Americans who earn less than $50,000 are living paycheck to paycheck, compared to roughly two in three of those making $50,000 to $100,000.
I'm sure that's part of it. It could help explain how one person has to live in a roach infested apartment while another can get a nice house in the suburbs. Same with having no car or only being able to afford a used one in poor condition vs having nice new cars with very low monthly payments. Those two things alone can mean a lot in terms of standard of living.
I know that they say it's expensive to be poor but it'd be a very broken system if we had a $60k a year social safety net for everyone, but poor people still couldn't afford fresh healthy food, reliable transportation, or adequate housing and were still fighting to keep their heads just above water.
Well, this is well outside of my area of expertise, but the only factual dispute attached to the image in wikipedia is that SSI is only available to people essentially assumed to be out of the work pool. From the SSI site: "Little or no income, and Little or no resources, and A disability, blindness, or are age 65 or older." That's a pretty tiny slice of that graph. Maybe it just hasn't been thoroughly interrogated but my gut says that whoever attached that SSI criticism would have probably addressed more severe discrepancies first.
The source-- a libertarian blog-- implies that the problem is welfare itself, but I think the bigger problem is a naive approach to means testing that is entirely divorced from economic reality.
The primary source is a welfare bureaucrat, Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare, not a libertarian blog: https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191
You mean former Secretary of Public Welfare, who resigned after two years on the job in 2013. He now runs an anti-welfare consulting business. He was highly controversial during the two years he was in the job, and the Obama administration had to step in. He also claimed he was moving to Pennsylvania, and then used public funds to commute to his Rhode Island home instead.
This fact alone doesn't mean much. He was appointed by a Republican governor and could very easily be a liberterian ideologue to the same degree of said blog.
That graph needs [citation]s. The source it cites does not mention how they obtained the figures for childcare, and a questioner in the comments asks for, and does not receive, a source for that information. The source article itself doesn't even seem to be the source, it links to yet another article. That article also doesn't seem to be the source, the source appears to be … a politician.
The childcare part — the largest and most problematic benefits cliff in the graph — appears to be specific to PA. But PA doesn't offer a monetary childcare benefit: one would have to be arguing that this is the specific dollar amount that the care is worth … which … IDK. I'd like to at least see that argument. But the vesting cliff, as depicted, doesn't line up with any of PA's cutoffs, either.
> I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line.
Because it's easier to pass a law that sets up such welfare when it has a simple threshold, or at least it was.
Last time this article came up, someone referenced a group of lawmakers in the US who were working at smoothing out these awful discontinuities, but I can't quickly rustle up the link.
The cliff might be a political feature: you save paying out the benefit (that you took credit for funding) since people who blow the cliff lose the money, but if they complain can be characterized as (some variation of) "welfare cheats".
> I have never understood why things like this don’t use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line.
They often do use sliding scales, but that’s more complex (and expensive) to administer, and (because of multiple interacting programs) ends up not actually solving much of anything. Also, because of the way things (including available funds) work, but even ignoring budgeting for the increased admin cost, a sliding scale probably would start stepping down from full benefit where a sharp cutoff is, that would probably be more like the middle of the sliding scale, so if you “barely squeaked in under the limit” on the sharp cutoff version, you’d probably get far less benefit under a sliding scale system.
I changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp.
Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since.
I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), and so I didn't qualify, for much of any of those kinds of offers. Most of the systems in place thought of students as a typical 4 year university student and frankly ... younger. One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview.
Some of these rules I get, they don't want someone abusing their free / discounts for other reasons and they have systems in place for dealing with traditional students.
With people changing jobs and seemingly continued potential for the need for job market retraining and related disruption and etc ... it feels like it's time to make some adjustments as far as what a "student" is and so on.
I finished my bachelors degree after I turned 40. I was a much better student than I’d been in my 20s or teens.
My wife is friendly pursuing her bachelor’s and it is clear to both of us that universities are really just tolerant of non-traditional students. You won’t be treated poorly, but all of the infrastructure, tools, class progression, etc, is constructed around post-Highschool young adults.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a community college, but I suspect they’re slightly better.
I agree, there's a weird culture barrier almost at times.
My wife was in grad school and pregnant. Some of the instructors seemed completely confused on how to handle things. Others seemed to handle it in stride.
It's like there's an expectation that "you're relatively poor, young" and some other expectations that when that's not the case the system starts to fall apart.
Yep, my wife did a masters degree in a program "for professionals", which was very clearly designed around people between the ages of 22 and 25, with empty evenings and weekends and definitely no children :)
>One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview.
Well, you missed out on a lucrative lawsuit there if you're in the US. An interviewer telling someone they're not going to be hired because they're over 40 (or even just because they're not young enough, when they are over 40) is legally equivalent to telling them they're not going to be hired because they're black or Jewish.
When you're changing your career and trying to get into an industry ... it's hard to know how that plays out. More directly a buddy of mine, also my age, and in the same camp was straight up told by a recruiter they were looking for someone younger. He had her on speakerphone and asked her to repeat it and she did.
Then the question was, do you want to be the guy who calls that out? Trying to get a job...
I don't think the outcome is a sure thing, in that case I wanted to do / say something but I felt like it was the applicant's call. Not an easy decision.
I respected his choice to just move on, still burns me up a little, but his call IMO.
Frankly, because many people think that any kind of welfare or assistance is, at best, a necessary evil—and more often just evil—and they want to make it painful, complicated, and hard to access.
There were parts of what I described that were brutally difficult. Particularly, we would receive a certain $ amount to purchase books (that were frequently $500+ dollars per semester). However, the office that doled this fund out would frequently be weeks behind, or your scheduled disbursement just wouldn’t show up. Then you’d have to find multiple hours out of your work week to go down to the financial aid office to wait in line for hours in an office that was only open 10am-2pm. Or sometimes the complete scam of a bank/card they forced you to use had some issue.
So, frequently, you wouldnt even be able to purchase books without a loan or extending credit til 1-2 months into the semester. by that time you could be having midterms and tons of assignment with no textbooks. I would frequently have to beg other students to let me photocopy sections of their books so I could do the assignments. Or resort to pirating.
To them that’s “working as intended” I guess. no amount of complaining ever got anywhere.
> some people think they deserve everything they can claim
If they are able to claim something doesn't it stand to reason that we think they deserve it? I am confused how you'd measure your qualification for welfare without using the qualification metrics.
At the end of the day welfare in the US extremely stingy even if you manage to max it out - it can be a struggle to survive in a lot of areas due to a lack of CoL adjustments.
A program strict enough to ensure that absolutely zero people get it who "shouldn't" is also a program strict enough that many of the people who should get it don't. Not because they don't meet the criteria, but because the bureaucracy around vetting people is sufficiently hard to navigate.
The usual solution is something like: for x units of excess past the set limit, remove y unit of subsidy/support.
Example: something costs 20 money, if you earn 100 money or below, then it is subsidized to cost only 10, where 10 money is a subsidy.
For every 2 money you gain, 1 money in subsidy is removed.
If you earn 104 money, it will now cost 12.
The x and y values vary depending on what kind of things are subsidized, but this is a fairly simple way of doing it that doesn't punish you harshly for a small difference in earnings.
Here’s my shot: Anyone may at any time declare a portion of their income to be “cliff income,” pay 40% percent tax on it to the feds and 20% to the state, and then keep the last 40% to do with as you please. All govt and private programs that measure income are required to disregard cliff income.
