> I remember reading a headline that being poor is equivalent to [...]

Some government forms and processes for poor people assistance I've seen (and I imagine that forms and processes for new immigrants may be similar)... some of it is insanely kafkaesque, implemented with incompetence/indifference in both official communications/documentation, and sometimes on an individual human representative basis, with the effect of making no sense at all.

So I'm not at all surprised if someone who doesn't understand how some category of things works in reality, is easily tricked into believing a scam. Because the scammer is no more ridiculous than some of the official government bureaucracy they've been subjected to.

(BTW, I'm not anti-government. I support what some would call "big government". I'm only horrified at how poorly done it sometimes gets in the details. I know that, when it is done poorly, it is going to have very real negative effects on people's lives, including on the least powerful. I believe in good, big government.)

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pjc50 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Some government forms and processes for poor people assistance I've seen (and I imagine that forms and processes for new immigrants may be similar)... some of it is insanely kafkaesque

There's little political pressure to make it easier, and constant worries about "fraud" by claimants, or means-testing, which is turned into adding more and more fields to the form.

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thephyber 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m convinced that some of those Byzantine rules are underhanded ways to destroy the usefulness of the welfare system. Politicians actively use what is called a “poison pill” to make legislation unpalatable; there’s no reason they can’t actually poison a welfare system they don’t want to exist.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are two primary things that cause this to happen in reality. The first is that politicians want to get credit for creating the program, but also don't want it to cost a lot of money. Their incentive is to create a program that sounds good but does and therefore costs as little as possible. But making it obvious that it doesn't do much compromises the "sounds good" requirement, so instead they make a bunch of complicated rules and barriers that keep the price tag low but in a way which is difficult to understand. Relatedly, the people administering the programs are often under orders to accept some particular number or proportion of claims, again for budgetary reasons, and then if there are too many they have to start fabricating barriers themselves. The second is that there is no accountability mechanism. Some majority of voters support the idea of the program, but they've been assured that it was created and exists and have no idea what a mess it is, and only a small minority are recipients. So if things are unintentionally broken, they don't get fixed, because the majority isn't aware of the problem and that's the only thing that gets politicians to address it. It's not because of politicians opposed to the program. If politicians opposed to the program have a controlling majority then they simply repeal it. It's the politicians who support the (pretense of) the program who screw it up. This is one of the reasons why complicated systems with many overlapping benefits each with their own application process and phase out rates are so ineffective, and the better way to address this is with simple direct transfer payments like expanding the EITC or a negative income tax.