[camgunz]

There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. This idea that we have to threaten people with literal starvation to get them to be productive members of society is ironically deeply impoverished.

And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the most productive people in our society are also the richest? Shouldn't it be the opposite? I struggle to see the pillars of this moral structure in any other way than "poor people are a different breed and need stricter rules to keep them in line". Which again is super wrong! TFA cites research that shows that these kids' parents work, but their wages/bills are too low/high. Does anyone want to guess how bad those parents' jobs are? Do we need to detail the struggles working people go through (lack of health care, wildly inconsistent hours, sexual harassment and assault, etc)? The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date.

And what is "freeloading" anyway? Kids of all backgrounds and parenting situations get to eat? Bring on the freeloading then. Who do I make the check out to?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders.

I don't believe that is true. You didn't provide any support for your claim at all either. Let's just consider a single example:

>In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

>...

>I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous.

>...

>As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability.

This is from NPR of all places: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County. That's how they got to the point where 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability there.

Another example: mtnGoat stated that their father was perfectly capable of paying for lunch but did not do so. If there was a need-based lunch program, mtnGoat would presumably be a "freeloader".

Arguably, the real problem in mtnGoat's case is they had an abusive parent. The relevant state tool would be child-protective services, not a cafeteria lunch lady.

I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

[framapotari]

> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a fact. You may not _want_ children to go hungry but if you advocate for that system then you are absolutely okay with a number of children going hungry.

[oefrha]

When I was in school we paid for (very fairly priced) school meals while the poor students were subsidized. It was handled pretty discreetly as well, I don’t think any kid was shamed for it, plus kids have a million ways to find out who’s poor anyway if they’re into bullying. So pretending the solution is binary is ridiculous.

Hell, my college education from Stanford, including room and board and a very modest allowance, was entirely covered by a university fund, no strings attached, while the rich kids paid in full. If $65k a year can be selectively waived (from a very rich institution, yes I’m aware, but I’m talking about the model), no way you can’t do that for a small portion of school lunches.

[BoingBoomTschak]

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so?

Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

[vidarh]

Pray tell what horrible consequences you expect from feeding children to ensure they don't go hungry.

[dredmorbius]

Crickets!!!

[framapotari]

I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.

[jdbernard]

This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.

[BoingBoomTschak]

1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing.

2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).

[rwmj]

And presumably you want them shaped in the best possible way, which is hardly possible if children are hungry or undernourished.

[framapotari]

1) If they don't have time or competency then surely they can pay for the services of someone who can. Most people don't have the time or competency to grow their own food but we still expect them to purchase their food from someone who can.

2) The state taking money from people by force in order to mandate the shaping of malleable young minds sounds like exactly the kind of grave consequences of socialism you fear.

[thrance]

Yeah, I'm a socialist: I believe children shouldn't be hungry in the richest country the Earth has ever seen. Sue me. Your slippery slope fallacy is no excuse for you willingness to let children starve.

Your country is falling into fasicsm and there are still people like you going "feeding kids is literally communism". No wonder this country is going down, its citizens are incapable of the most basic compassion toward one another.

[GuinansEyebrows]

i don't think you understand what socialism is. government assistance programs are not socialism.

[dredmorbius]

As much as I'm in favour of such programmes, they are in fact social welfare and part of the social welfare state.

It's not absolute public ownership of all means of production. But within the continuum between reactionary caveat emptor lessez faire private absolutism and fully automated luxury gay space communism, it's a nudge or two toward the latter.

And an unarguable good, I hasten to add.

[taurath]

If you’ve ever considered going on disability, or needed to, you’d be very quickly enlightened. It’s hard. You have to have documentation, you will get denied. Even then the benefits are pretty shit. It’s not a thing that you can just accidently get. There’s a lot of people who are just disabled.

What happens if the parents who should be responsible, aren’t?

[lukan]

"What happens if the parents who should be responsible, aren’t?"

Normally, child protection service?

(But what I know, they don't always improve things)

[vidarh]

Which do you think is cheaper: Involving social services because someone isn't paying for school lunch, which would involve the state either paying foster parents or providing other costly monitoring, possible court cases, and/or support, or simply covering the cost of school lunches?

[lukan]

Simply covering school lunches, if this would be the decusion here.

But that wouldn't solve the problem of negligent parents, only ease things a little bit for children.

[vidarh]

But "negligent" isn't a binary, and it's not just parents who don't want to, but parents who can't afford to. For a lot of children, easing things a little bit might be all that is needed. For others it might ease things enough that it can be part of a set of relatively light interventions.

For those who genuinely need more heavy handed interventions, it's not a solution, but it's also not in any way detrimental.

[switch007]

For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare, who could have worked, because they learnt the game. The two sides have to move beyond these talking points if any useful discussion is to be had.

[camgunz]

> For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare

This is perfectly accurate: the stories you hear make these issues out to be equal, when in fact they're anything but. Study after study shows that work requirements (the policy you're implicitly advocating for here) do not work:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expandi...

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/work-requirements-dont-work

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-that-work-requiremen...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/tanf-studies-show-work-require...

https://www.epi.org/publication/snap-medicaid-work-requireme...

More to the point, millions of people are eligible for TANF benefits but don't receive them. Which is to say, even if there are some people scamming the system, there's tons of people who could legitimately receive benefits but don't.

---

The overall point here is that if we let criminals and a very small number of freeloaders sour us on these programs, we literally let kids go hungry; we literally let them die of preventable illnesses; etc. etc. It is absolutely bonkers to me that we are making this tradeoff.

[switch007]

FWIW I do more than "hear" about these "stories". My figures weren't just made up. Personal experience but I'm not saying more than that

[GuinansEyebrows]

so, you anecdotally know enough people who are somehow receiving benefits you don't think they deserve to tip the scale by a statistically relevant amount?

[b2w]

The kid is starving and child protective services isn't a free lunch program. Is the effort of potentially displacing the kid to foster care really solving the immediate problem?

[vidarh]

Foster parents are also paid most places. Even purely in financial terms, for each child in foster care over something like this you could feed a lot of children instead, and avoiding the harmful effects of unnecessary interventions.

[dredmorbius]

The benefit we're talking about here is food. Served in school lunchrooms. To students who are enrolled at that school. How exactly do you see this being abused?

People can only eat so much at a single sitting. Even highly-active, sports-team-member, teenaged boys. (I used to be one.) There are no massive opportunities for skimming or graft in the lunch line itself.

What could go wrong?

A child who's not otherwise likely to be in school decides to attend because they get fed. Win!

A child whose family are capable of affording a full-cost lunch free-ride. So what, that's a small fraction of total meals, make it up in taxes! (As I've discussed previously in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43895455>.)

Complaints about free meals are like complaining about penny-ante voter fraud. The big opportunities aren't in showing up to polling places, as that's simply too expensive (in direct, physical-space costs). Voter fraud as a viable tactic occurs through unwarranted voter-roll purges, by disinformation about voting times and places, very rarely through corruption of counting processes (voting machines, election judges, and the like). But not by having people showing up to vote multiple times.

Sure, there's opportunity for fraud in school lunch programmes, but it's not transacted through stomachs. It's lunchroom staff skimming the till, it's vendor fraud, it's political corruption, it's kickbacks and sweetheart deals.

All of which are in fact real fraud.

But they are not identified or mitigated through means testing. Rather you want forensic audits, oversight, management practices, and law-enforcement investigating and prosecuting actual political corruption.

The kids eat either way.

[camgunz]

> Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County.

You can just look at what Social Security says about this [0]. TL;DR:

- Baby boomers getting old

- Economic conditions (you can see this in the data [1], where there's a suspicious huge leap in claims right around Trump monkeying around w/ the economy)

- Absent/inadequate health care

More directly, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with culture. The average disability application age is ~50 [2]. If this were a cultural issue you'd see that number declining.

> Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

What policy are you advocating here? So far all you've talked about is the non-existent freeloader problem.

[0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/briefing-papers/bp2019-01.ht...

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html

[2]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2023/sect03...

[gred]

> There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs.

This is a wild statement. Of course people take advantage of welfare programs. Of course welfare programs have unintended consequences and sometimes encourage immoral or anti-social behavior. That doesn't mean they're all bad or that they need to be completely eliminated, but leading with this obvious falsehood made it very hard to read the rest of your comment.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/covid-19-fraud-enfor...

[camgunz]

This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things:

- The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the program. There were 640,000 SNAP fraud investigations in 2014 [0]. If they cost $1,000 each that's $640m, and I bet they cost more!

- The vast majority of fraud is either criminal, retailer, or both [1]

The "moral hazard" angle of these programs is wildly overplayed. You don't hear anything about:

- criminal trafficking

- retailer fraud

- program benefits

There's political reasons for this, but it doesn't matter. Our brainrot on social programs is intense.

> https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/covid-19-fraud-enfor...

Looking at the fact sheet linked from that release [2], that stat that jumps out to me is 3,500 individuals charged totaling $1.4b in stolen CARES Act funds (this isn't a direct stat, but the numbers only get worse if we presume even more money from this and other programs was stolen), which is $400k/individual charged. It doesn't really seem possible for a person or household to have bilked the government for $400k under the individual benefits of the CARES Act [3]. We're looking at white collar fraud here, again a thing you never hear anything about.

Finally, we should view some levels of fraud as indicative of broader social ills. For example the number of blue collar jobs has greatly diminished just in a single lifetime [4]. Could that be responsible for the dramatic increase in Social Security Disability claims (yes)?

[0]: https://www.cbpp.org/snap-combating-fraud-and-improving-prog...

[1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R45147.html

[2]: https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus/media/1347156/dl?inline

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act#Relief_to_individual...

[4]: https://cepr.net/publications/the-decline-of-blue-collar-job...

[hgomersall]

As the lauded private sector are well aware, the optimal amount of fraud is non zero:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

[ggandv]

I wonder if optimizing for votes, as is the day to day business of most policy makers, gets you to the same place as optimizing for profits like in the private sector? If not, studying that could be one way to improve the public sector output. Not that shareholders vote, on average, but you get the idea.

[mech9879876]

You swept the issue of fraudulent social security disability claims under the rug. It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.

[camgunz]

I posted about it in a different little branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903848

TL;DR: the average disability recipient age has hovered ~50 (stddev 1.54 years) since 1960. The theory of "baby boomers are a huge generation, they got old and US health care sucks ass" is far more parsimonious than your theory of individual accountability, which has to explain why every generation suddenly becomes fraudulent/immoral/unaccountable at the exact same point in their lives.

[mech9879876]

Aggregating statistics regarding age has very little explanatory value in regards to fraud and is a non sequitir. I would not be surprised if the average age of a convicted insurance fraudster has remained relatively constant over time either.

The example in linked materials of 1 in 4 adults in Hale County receiving disability payments is a clear example of a situation where individuals and healthcare providers have both contributed to widescale fraud. This is an obvious case where moral hazard is present and you continue to deny it.

[camgunz]

This is my claim: the narrative that these programs incentivize and facilitate freeloading is false. Let's use your example: NPR's exploration of Hale County [0], which I'm not sure you've read/listened to.

The first interview [1] is exactly what I've written: baby boomers got older and more disabled, and economic conditions pushed people into disability. Quote: "consider this: Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we've been averaging about 150,000 new jobs created per month. But in that same period, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability every month." What do you want these people to do, manifest new jobs?

The second interview [2] outlines how the definition of disability has expanded over the years and the way the legal profession has exploited that to increase the number and success rate of disability claims. Again, not freeloading.

The third interview [3] describes how welfare-to-work legislation put a higher burden of the welfare onto states, so it's actually in their financial benefit to move people off of welfare and onto Social Security disability--so much so in fact that they pay people to do it. Quote: "PCG estimates it'll save Missouri about $80 million with all the people that will be getting onto disability and off of welfare".

Interviews 4 [4] and 5 [5] describe how people and families get trapped in these systems where if they do too well they'll experience extreme financial hardship. Quote: "a lot of the letters that we got from people responding to the stories were people saying, I'm one of those 14 million people on disability and I want to work. But I get health insurance on disability and what job am I going to find that accommodates my disability, it also gives me health insurance."

If your model of this problem is "there's a bunch of people too lazy to work who are freeloading on the public dole" you will be unsuccessful at solving it, because your model is wrong.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/series/196621208/unfit-for-work-the-star...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175072446/millions-of-america...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/26/175396983/expanded-definition...

[3]: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/27/175502085/moving-people-from-...

[4]: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/28/175619112/kids-may-stay-on-di...

[5]: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/29/175722025/americans-on-disabi...