I always felt simplifying all this, it would probably be possible to consolidate and offer proper health care, and a real welfare, along with a supplemental program for those inapt to work, with it all costing less than the mountain of piled complexity and paper work that we have today.

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terminalshort 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The system in its current insane state serves the purposes of multiple groups of people:

1. The bureaucrats administering the system because the more complex and insan the system is, the more bureaucrats you need.

2. The politicians who can promise $X of benefits to N people while knowing all along that due to the complexity of the system the actual cost of the program will be well under X*N due to failure to claim the benefits.

3. Companies that can now hire workers for less than their cost of living because they know they can just make it up out of government benefits.

And it hurts, of course, the poor people who depend on these programs. But that doesn't matter politically, because these people are mostly not smart enough to even figure out how they are being screwed. Whereas the people in 1-3 above are absolutely smart enough to figure out how they benefit from the current system and they vote and donate accordingly.

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torginus 3 days ago | parent [-]

3. has always bothered me - if you run a McDonalds, you have to pay market price for the building, kitchen equipment, both when buying and maintaining it. If you don't pay enough to maintain the fridge, it won't unionize - it will break down.

The idea proposed by these 'free market types', that somehow people working there below sustenance salaries 'deserve it' - that the cost of labor needs to be essentially subsidized just doesn't make sense to me.

Practice what you preach - either pay the wages people need to get by, or close down.

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fzeroracer 3 days ago | parent [-]

Agreed, 3 is the one that consistently annoys me in arguments I see across the internet. The reason why our welfare programs exist and are in such a disasterous place is partially because they are literal corporate subsidies so they can buy workers at a premium. If you were to kick out the ladder and fully remove the minimum wage and remove our welfare systems it would outright collapse the economy because A) working would be a full net negative in income generation and B) corporations would crash and burn realizing that they can no longer hire workers at their subsidized price.

The sane way to approach a system like this is just UBI + socialized healthcare but I think we'll approach labor collapse before we see movement in this direction by out of touch bureaucrats.

	▲	torginus 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't go so far - I would just raise the minimum wage to a level where a person can actually make ends meet. Sure some folks would be fired, and their jobs automated, but they could be redirected towards better paying opportunities. If all else fails, then the money saved by such approaches could be used for welfare. It's just putting things from one pocket into the other for the government. As things stand, these corporate subsidies are just for enshrining inefficiencies in the system.

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BarryMilo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So UBI + universal healthcare? Sign me up!