How About This To "End" Welfare

This is certainly not a new idea and is being practiced in various ways around the world. The idea is to take all the money spent on every form of “welfare” and disperse it monthly to every person in the country. But this means food stamps, medicare, housing money… are all gone. You get your monthly allotment and that’s that. Now, to be sure it should be prorated for various reasons but it eliminates all fraud… You can be a drug addict, homeless, try and be achiever… and that check rolls in every month.

I like the idea.

Medicare is not fucking welfare.

I don’t think you can call this an “idea” at this point (even with the caveat that it’s not new).
This is a very common topic of discussion right now here on the Dope and in wider society.

In my own view, a basic income makes a lot of sense, especially as society possibly transitions into a phase where productivity is sky-high but finding things for everyone to do is temporarily difficult.
But there are a few wrinkles, so rolling out such a plan is not so simple:

  1. A basic income would probably mean a huge drop for some people. e.g. someone with a severe disability. Or someone living in an expensive city and receiving housing allowance right now. So either you never completely eliminate welfare, or you throw some people under the bus.
  2. Obviously it still needs to be worthwhile to do even low-paid work if you can find it, otherwise you might unnecessarily decrease employment.
  3. The biggest obstacle for places like the US is culture. The OP seems to tacitly agree that welfare is a bad thing / a dirty word.
    Well, how do you think a basic income will be considered? It will be much worse. It will be depicted as prying money out of the hands of some hard-working mother of 3 who works two jobs, and giving it to some ethnic minority to buy drugs and watch TV all day.

How about we stop the nonsense and just help people in need?

The bible commands us to feed the hungry, heal the sick, etcetera. At no point does the bible say “but the government shouldn’t do this”. It also doesn’t say that only churches should do this, or only private individuals.

If you’re not a Christian (or other allegedly compassionate religion) and you’re just a reasonable, compassionate Human being, then don’t participate in trying to stop the one force we have in society - that exists for the management of our society, from doing what we as a modern society need it to do.

If you want to end welfare cheating, then increase the enforcement budget, to find the cheaters and get them out of the system. You don’t do it by hurting everyone else out of some strange angry posturing.

Any discussion of “welfare” is meaningless until you actually define it, complete with each government program listed and the amounts. Then state why you want these programs cut, and how you wish to account for meeting humane needs now that the money is gone.

There’s no way society is going to say “tough shit, guess you’ll just have to be homeless / starve” to all the people that waste their UBI on beer and smokes / Nikes / heroine.

Name one parable where a government official did those things with government money. Name one time where anybody even hinted that it was the government’s responsibility to do such things.

Sounds vaguely like universal basic income.

In the US, we spend maybe ~2.5 trillion a year on various forms of welfare (if you include health care programs like medicaid, medicare, SCHIP, etc as welfare).

That works out to about $8000 a year per person.

It sounds like a bad idea, because when people are elderly they collect on average about 30k a year in social security and medicare. They collect very little the rest of their lives. You are just taking the money they collect in the final 15-20 years of life and dispersing it over the entire 80 years.

Name one parable where the government is prohibited from helping people in the manner Chimera describes.

A lot of features of the modern world are not mentioned in the bible.

So, for someone inclined to follow such a religion, there’s a degree of interpretation in deriving what the actual principle was and applying it to the modern world.

Which seems more charitable? Living in a country with progressive taxation, where the sick get the care they need and the poor are given help to improve their lives, or one where the rich get to keep more of their money so they can buy muscle cars and retire earlier to the golf course? To me, this is one of the easier “What would Jesus do?” questions.

Love this 10 second Craig T Nelson rant (you probably know the one):

Freakonomics podcast does have an episode about the universal income thing (I don’t really remember it, but you might want to check it out)

There’s no one way to do things that will be “fair”. There are plenty of ways to do things that are unfair.l
And I totally agree it’s not possible to come up with a universal definition of welfare.

In general the bible and all major religious texts are terrible models for organising society. Best to to keep them out of it when considering what a modern society should/should not be.

I demand that heroines be rewarded! I don’t consider that money a waste at all! And Nike was the personification of heroines! Even better!

Smokey the Bear is a pretty good guy, too!

I would agree, but you have people like Flyer, above, who hide behind the bible to declare that government has no business doing such things.

The Universal Basic Income, which is what you’re suggesting, is regularly discussed, often, on the SDMB.

It would be wasteful to give it to everyone, though. Writing universal-basic-income checks to people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would be an unnecessary drain on the system.

Finally, it might be astronomically expensive. Suppose everyone gets $25,000 US a year, which in many places in America wouldn’t even be enough to make ends meet. With 323 million people in the United States, that’s $8 trillion a year. That vastly ***dwarfs ***what we spend on Medicare, welfare, Social Security, etc. every year, combined.

How about this? (numbers just for illustration)
30,000 max UBI
If you make 25,000, you get 5,000 to bring you up. If you only make 15,000, you get 15,000. Maybe for declared household add 15,000 for one(extra) adult and 10,000 per child.
There should be area adjustments. Even SF or NYC need cashiers, waitstaff, janitors, all those low wage jobs.

It would be even more wasteful to not give it to them. If everyone gets UBI, then you write checks to everyone, and you’re done. If only some people get UBI, then you have to have people working to figure out who those people should be, and looking for people who shouldn’t be getting it but are, either because of mistakes or because they’re cheating the system, and if they are cheating the system then you need more people to track down those people who are cheating the system and bring them to justice, and so on. Plus, suppose you have someone who’s just barely below whatever cutoff you set, who’s trying to decide whether to work a little bit harder to make a little bit more money: If they make enough more that their UBI gets cut off, then they’ll actually take home less, and nobody wants to work harder to take home less money, and we also don’t want a system which incentivizes people not to work harder.

It’s much easier all around to just make it truly universal. If you’re worried about fairness for Gates and Trump, that should be baked into the higher taxes that they pay, and if it’s not, then that’s a problem with the tax system, not with UBI.

That’s why UBI is less interesting than “the government provides 10 heated square meters, a bed, a TV, healthcare and as much NutriPaste™ as you can put away ; every day, for the rest of your life - anything further you gotta work for”.

This is probably more realistic I’d guess.

Small studio apartments, basic food and health care. Not a bad life by any means, but probably something that only costs a few hundred a month to provide (other than the health care).

The other side of that coin is what happens in bad times, or under oppressive governments.

Look at North Korea. Basic apartments and really low levels of food provided, but you have to be party members, yada yada to get more. You also get drafted on a regular basis to harvest crops, work in the countryside, etc. And you’re expected to come up with “gifts” to the leaders or military on top of that, out of your misery pay.

Given the “make these people work” requirements that Republicans want to put on welfare and basic assistance, do we really want the government to be able to mandate those sorts of forced labor things on the poor, on people receiving guaranteed basic income? Because I guarantee that would happen, even here.