[Siddarth1977]

These sorts of vague, slightly conspiratorial and cynical comments aren't helpful. "The system" isn't designed by some secret cabal of sinister tricksters who are intending it to fail specific people in specific ways.

"The system" is a hodgepodge of thousands of different laws, programs, agencies and organizations under a multitude of federal, state, county and city jurisdictions and operating under rules and budgets that were approved over numerous different sets of elected and appointed individuals over decades, each of which had to strike compromises and try to work within the existing system.

If you don't do enough to prevent fraud, you get a lot of fraud (see recent issues with covid payroll protection and other related measures, or homeowners insurance issues in Florida after hurricanes). If you do too much to prevent fraud, you get legitimate cases not getting the support they need.

No matter what the system is, you're going to have some amount of both "false positive" and "false negative" outcomes from it.

[hellotomyrars]

I think it isn’t exactly as conspiratorial as you are portraying it. It is a mess and some of that is an amalgamation of cruft. However limiting social spending is a major political point of conservative politics, like it or not.

There is very little effort towards making the system better for people who rely on it. And a lot of that is specifically due to politics.

The barrier between a recipient of benefits and the SSA is insane and has the obvious effect of making it harder to access those benefits. That isn’t just happenstance.

People living off SSA benefits aren’t exactly living large. I know because I work in a field that provides income based services and is almost entirely funded with federal/state money. Preventing fraud is not the primarily objective of the SSA when it comes to benefits, it is preventing paying out at all.

Edit: On the PPP Covid loans, I agree they were made in a way that allowed them to be abused. The thing about that though is that corporate welfare is the only acceptable form of welfare based on recent history. We throw millions at telecoms companies, who are often the worst rated companies in the country. Verizon even told the federal government that more money wouldn’t help them roll out infrastructure any faster, but the government still gave them more.

The obvious difference between social welfare is that people have a major inequality of power and that leaves them in an incredibly disadvantageous position to climb over a very tall obstacle. Corporations meanwhile pay lobbyist out the ass to basically ghost write legislation to benefit them personally, as well as get government money. But hey, that’s free market capitalism, right? Sorry this is a little aggressive and I don’t mean this as a personal attack on you, just got a little angry as I watched a client struggle with the VA over benefits between the time I wrote this post and this edit.

[dragonwriter]

> “The system” isn’t designed by some secret cabal of sinister tricksters who are intending it to fail specific people in specific ways.

That’s true; the elites rigging it to fail often are not at all secret about their intent, the most common of which–for the entire inadequate social safety net–is to ensure that it errs on the side of maintaining economic coercion driving people into accepting poor terms in the labor market to ensure aggregate output and low labor costs and minimize consumption of government-supplied benefits even when it would yield a palpable increase in living conditions.

[mlyle]

> "The system" is a hodgepodge of thousands of different laws, programs, agencies and organizations under a multitude of federal, state, county and city jurisdictions and operating under rules and budgets that were approved over numerous different sets of elected and appointed individuals over decades, each of which had to strike compromises and try to work within the existing system.

Yah... the problem is, there's a critical mass where the main job of the system becomes to perpetuate the status quo. Efforts at simplification or to raise efficacy are threatening to too much of the system and attract substantial resistance.

I think a core problem facing the US is a lack of administrative capacity in government. We have excessively complicated systems collapsing under their own weight, but steadfastly defending their own existence. We have the political right thinking this is an inevitable characteristic of government, and so they create a self-fulfilling prophecy by kneecapping administrative strengths whenever they can; and we have a political left that is so excited about all the things government can do to help that they don't spend nearly enough effort considering how we can build the administrative systems necessary to reap these benefits.

[jlarocco]

> No matter what the system is, you're going to have some amount of both "false positive" and "false negative" outcomes from it.

And don't forget the feedback loop when people see the bad outcomes and demand there should be a law...

[TeMPOraL]

To add to what you wrote: the system is also dynamic. How it works (or doesn't) today impacts how it'll look tomorrow. Interventions can be made, and they may initially improve things, and then the world at large adjusts to balance them out. It needs continuous tuning.

Conversations like this are part of it too, though I admit it's frustrating to see the same problems being highlighted over and over again, for decade or more, with no improvement in sight.

[hotpotamus]

If you wanted to embed dark patterns, wouldn't such an opaque system be ideal?

I don't think "the system" such as it is is designed by a secret cabal of sinister tricksters, but they do get a seat at the table, don't they? And they're not exactly going to come out about being in the secret cabal are they? That would be a pretty poor secret cabal.