[godelski]

> Please answer both questions.

Which costs more?

1) Indiscriminately handing people $1k/mo

2) Developing a means test, applying the means test, setting up a system for verification that people meet the means, distributing the money to the people that match the criteria.

I mean I can't tell you because there are dependent variables on what those means are. But two cheap options are #1 and #2 with a means that is so high that you don't pay anyone out but instead have that structure where we're still paying people (we could adequately call it a jobs program at that point).

But let's think about this from a different point of view that I don't think many here are, despite that this is an engineering perspective: failure modes. #1's failure mode is that people that don't need the money will get the money (we'll include things like drug addicts and irresponsible people here for simplicity's sake), #2's failure mode is that people that need the money won't get the money while minimizing the number of people who take advantage of the system (non-zero number).

Truth is we need to balance these two: cost and failure modes. From the high level perspective that this entire thread is at and really the entire comment (and basically every conversation had on this subject) is nowhere near the resolution where we can remotely say that 1 or 2 is better. All we can say is #1 is easier to implement. #2 is undefined because its parameters are undefined. Having a conversation at this level is just idiotic. There's very little for us to reasonably discuss and impossible for any real definitive answer to be made. The way these discussions are being framed can only lead to fighting because there is no means of determining better and there can't be (until we define and get more detail).