alt Hacker NewsI always felt simplifying all this, it would probably be possible to consolidate and offer proper health care, and a real welfare, along with a supplemental program for those inapt to work, with it all costing less than the mountain of piled complexity and paper work that we have today.
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BarryMilo • last Monday at 4:12 AM
So UBI + universal healthcare? Sign me up!
The system in its current insane state serves the purposes of multiple groups of people:
1. The bureaucrats administering the system because the more complex and insan the system is, the more bureaucrats you need.
2. The politicians who can promise $X of benefits to N people while knowing all along that due to the complexity of the system the actual cost of the program will be well under X*N due to failure to claim the benefits.
3. Companies that can now hire workers for less than their cost of living because they know they can just make it up out of government benefits.
And it hurts, of course, the poor people who depend on these programs. But that doesn't matter politically, because these people are mostly not smart enough to even figure out how they are being screwed. Whereas the people in 1-3 above are absolutely smart enough to figure out how they benefit from the current system and they vote and donate accordingly.