| 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. |