Everyone has admitted that issues exist, nobody has claimed that the system was perfect.Jmustang1968 wrote:Besides JT, I have seen no one take a stance beyond defending it or to even admit there are issues.
Anecdotes are the worst form of evidence due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is confirmation bias. The data suggests a different story.It is mostly attack or aggressively defend welfare systems! Abuse is so rare, yet it is commonly seen by many who just need to open their eyes to see it.
It only takes a couple of instances of seeing something for a human to form a correlation in their mind. A good example would be lucky charms. A person might swear up and down that it actually helps them and gives them luck, and in their mind they probably percieve that as being the case. Every time they're using the charm and something good happens to them, they register it as confirmation. An analysis of how well they actually do in various instances regarding chance however would probably reveal that they aren't anywhere near as lucky as they think.
A more real-world example might be the commonly held wisdom that sugary snacks make kids hyperactive. Every parent (or really, anyone who's ever had to spend a lot of time with kids) will likely attest that candy will make their kid go bouncing off the walls. You can easily find tons of anecdotes to the effect of "my kid ate an entire box of cupcakes and was bouncing off the walls all night."
Place that scenario in a properly blinded study, however, and the effect disappears. Sugar doesn't make kids hyper at all it turns out, kids are just balls of energy in general.
We dismiss them as being rare because by every statistical measure they are rare.It is obvious the problem we have with it are the abusers and lifers. Not the legitimate in a bad situation or back on their feet type of recipients. However, our points are then assumed to encompass all recipients. The term and culture of things like 'hood rich' and such exist and are prevalent, joking aside with the song lyrics I posted, which I found amusingly on topic. Instead of addressing these points we have brought up, everyone has tried to dismiss them as being rare to non existent or as not an issue.
The points we've tried to make are:
1. You don't know everyone's situation. What sort of clothes they wear, what car they drive, or what gadget or phone someone uses is in no way an indication that they are committing benefits fraud.
2. Actual fraud happens, nobody thinks it's a good thing, which is why we have agencies that specifically target and try to fight fraud. If you have good reason to think someone is actually committing benefits fraud, report them.
3. Statistically, actual fraud is rare. If you're going to say we should implement expensive changes to the system, you should be able to actually prove there's a significant problem first with data and research. Based on what we currently know, most "belt tightening" provisions that are commonly suggested would end up costing us more in taxpayer dollars than we'd actually save.
I've heard of this idea, and with increasing automation slowly getting rid of what jobs are actually available, it's something I think might be necessary to seriously look into in the future. There's way too many question marks with it though, and frankly I'd like to see a few cities, etc try it out first as a test case before anyone even thinks of implementing something like that on a national level.Menegrothx wrote:Negative income tax/basic income seems to be an idea that both libertarians (Milton Friedman) and new school socialists support. In theory it gets rid of the bureaucracy (meaning no abuse and less public resources spent on running the bureaucratic network) while maintaining a safety net that covers all people. That combined with moving away from taxing productivity and moving towards taxing consumption seems, atleast on paper, like the way to go. Whether you can combine those ideas and still make enough tax revenue to support important public institutions is a different question all together.
