> I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce outside of it, like writing letters and counting to 30 days. (People telling me they were incapable of doing these two things is why I started ghostwriting letters for debtors.) We now have literal computer programs exempting heuristically identified professional managerial class members from debt collection, inclusive of their legitimate debts, so that debt collectors can more profitably conserve their time to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit.
That is such a common pattern. Growing up, I saw the same happen with the German welfare system: there's enough of a social safety net in that country that no one would have to be homeless. But, to access the social safety net, you have to navigate some minimal amount of bureaucracy and paperwork.
That bar isn't very high, but if you have at least that minimal skill with paperwork literacy, you are also much more likely to have a job and much less likely to need the welfare.
So all in all, Germany still has homeless people, despite welfare programs generous enough in principle that no one needs to be homeless.
Addendum: Singapore has an ingenious system to ration the amount of subsidies you get on hospital bills without any bureaucracy. The basic idea is that when you go for a hospital stay, you get to pick how much etxra creature comforts you are getting, like your own private room vs an open word with many beds. The copay for the fancier options rises 'progressively' enough, that the absolute amount of government subsidy goes down. People tend to self-sort voluntarily.
The medical care you receive is the same for any of the options.
I can imagine an argument that this is somehow against the dignity of poor people to put them into comparatively crowded wards, and that everyone should get the same treatment (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money). But I suspect many of the poorer people are happier to put up with that 'indignity' than with paperwork and privacy-invading bureaucratic means testing.
In total, adding up private and public expenditures, Singapore spends about half as much on healthcare as a proportion of GDP than the UK does, which spends about half as much as the US. Medical outcomes are no worse in the cheaper systems.
A little over a decade ago I knew a young adult in the US that had a pretty rough life and I was trying to help her get back on her feet.
When you’re homeless, it’s hard to get mail, and hard to keep your stuff; going from nothing to your standard documents is tricky.
To get your birth certificate, you need to write a check to the state at some address where you’ll be able to receive mail in 2-4 weeks.
Once you have that, you can go into the social security office and request a replacement social security card. Which they’ll mail to you in 2-4 weeks. There’s also a lifetime limit to how many times you can replace your card, which is surprisingly small.
State ID cards also get mailed to you. Moreover, you need to provide proof of your address, and the address gets printed on the card. We used my address, but no good deed goes unpunished - the address on your ID card gets published in the paper when you’re arrested. Then my nosy neighbor asks if everyone is alright because someone living at my house got arrested for possession of meth.
On top of each of those steps costing money and being hard to do when you’re homeless, there’s a dependency chain. You got to do them one at a time.
Navigating the public bureaucracy is an annoyance for someone in what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class. There are other social strata’s where it’s a virtual impossibility without help. That’s important to keep in mind when you’re thinking about welfare bureaucracy or voter ID laws or anything like that.
The really shit side: its impossible to change your drivers license (which is your "official address") to homeless.
And if you get sued, they send your mail to that former address, regardless if you ever get it.
And, well, I was sued. My parents destroyed my mail. And had a summary judgement against me on a case I didnt know exist, to an address I couldn't change cause I didnt have a new one.
German driver's licences don't normally have addresses on them. You can easily find example pictures of them with an image search on the web.
> If legal actions were to occur involving an average person, how does that person get notified?
The authorities send you a letter at the address that's registered with them (if you have one and they have one). That system is just completely independent of driver's licenses.
Your government ID card and passport do have your address on them (if you have one).
Interestingly, I also don't have a fixed address in Germany, because I haven't lived there in a while.
Officially, you need to tell them that you are leaving, but for the longest time I did not. (Mostly out of laziness.) They tracked me down once in Singapore to remind me to pay back my student loans, and I dutifully complied.
My passport shows my Australian address, because that's where I lived when I last had to renew that document. (And it also only shows that I lived in Sydney without any further details. German addresses would tell to the street and number etc.)
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Just to summarize: Germany does have many of the same issues in general (but the exact details vary). It just so happens that in Germany this system does not intersect (much) with driver's licenses.
Mostly because Driver's licenses are not used as general ID cards in Germany.
> That’s important to keep in mind when you’re thinking about welfare bureaucracy or voter ID laws or anything like that.
Amen to that. Though luckily while it's huge problem for the former, it doesn't matter for the latter. (Because individuals by and large don't benefit from being able to vote. Voting is at best something altruistic, individuals do out of civic duty.)
Is there supposed to be a restricted demographic with a monopoly on identification? The overwhelming majority of Americans have one. Even the large majority of any given minority group does. And if this is a legitimate concern it could be mitigated by, for example, making it free to get a state ID. Address whatever prevents some people from having one, instead of not requiring it.
But also, isn't your disaster scenario the thing that happens in a democracy regardless? Majority rule when you're the minority.
What you're left with is the fairness argument: It's supposed to be one person, one vote. But that's the argument the proponents of voter ID make.
Have you read the rest of the discussion, or at least the comments higher up the chain?
> Is there supposed to be a restricted demographic with a monopoly on identification? [...] mitigated by, for example, making it free to get a state ID.
We were talking about how many ostensibly free resources, rights and welfare are gated behind paperwork and bureaucracy. The discussion was exactly about just making something free is only a small part; and most of the time money isn't even the biggest hurdle for poor people.
I don't have too strong of an opinion on voter id laws. (I grew up in Germany where approximately everyone a government ID, and you need it for voting. And that seems to work ok. And the US system of mostly not requiring voter ID also seems to work ok.) But despite my lack of opinion on whether those laws are good or not, I can understand that just making ID cost $0 misses most of the hurdles in practice.
But isn't that the point? You have to address the other hurdles too.
For most benefits programs that is still going to be necessary even if you remove means testing, because some kind of identification would be necessary to keep someone from claiming the benefit an unlimited number of times. Which is the same as the problem with voting.
Singapore has an ingenious system to ration the amount of subsidies you get on hospital bills without any bureaucracy. The basic idea is that when you go for a hospital stay, you get to pick how much extra creature comforts you are getting, like your own private room vs an open word with many beds. The copay for the fancier options rises 'progressively' enough, that the absolute amount of government subsidy goes down. People tend to self-sort voluntarily.
The medical care you receive is the same for any of the options.
I can imagine an argument that this is somehow against the dignity of poor people to put them into comparatively crowded wards, and that everyone should get the same treatment (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money). But I suspect many of the poorer people are happier to put up with that 'indignity' than with paperwork and privacy-invading bureaucratic means testing.
In total, adding up private and public expenditures, Singapore spends about half as much on healthcare as a proportion of GDP than the UK does, which spends about half as much as the US. Medical outcomes are no worse in the cheaper systems.
That works for medicine because nobody wants two appendectomies. But plenty of people would want a second apartment, an unlimited amount of subsidized food they could resell, another UBI or social security payment etc. Then everyone backs up their truck to fill it with a fungible commodity being offered below the market price.
The biggest problem with most of these things isn't that they require ID, it's that they require means testing. Showing your ID is, I mean, you take it out of your pocket. We could make one sufficiently easy to get and then it works for everything.
But if you also have to show that you're currently unemployed but previously made an amount of money within the eligibility threshold but haven't been unemployed for more than six months to collect unemployment and then show that you don't have investment income more than some other amount to get food assistance and then show that your household income is below some other threshold to get housing assistance etc. etc., that's a hot mess.
The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork. But it still requires something basic to keep you from getting more than one.
You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
It's a terrible wast of people's time, but it solves the specific problem.
> The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork.
Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
> You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
You can do this, but is that supposed to be less burdensome than requiring ID?
> Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
That's fine from a theoretical perspective, but the practical point is that it doesn't require separate means testing paperwork for the transfer payment.
> At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
Only in the sense that it would remove the means testing whatsoever.
If you look at the effective rate curve of a flat tax - UBI, it's quite progressive and can be made arbitrarily so by adjusting the tax rate and the amount of the UBI. And this is in fact the preferred way to do it, because phase outs for existing benefits programs are often higher than tax rates paid in higher tax brackets, especially when combined with a lower but still non-zero tax rate at low to middle income levels.
Switching to a flat combined tax-and-phase-out rate would be no less and possibly more progressive than the existing system, while also being vastly simpler and require no means testing paperwork or privacy-invasive income tracking of any kind.
I agree that individual votes by and large don’t matter, but when public policy makes it harder for an entire class of people to vote, that does matter, especially when there’s a correlation between the class of people and policy preferences.
This is the same with tax collection in the US (seen different versions of this done by IRS, California’s BOE and SF treasury)
It goes something like this: they send you a scary looking letter telling you there’s something off about your taxes, you then need to call them (because they don’t do email and mailing anything will go over the time limit to comply), then they tell you more in detail what the problem is and push you to amend your return forms, once you do, you’ve legally accepted liability for whatever extra taxes they convinced you you owed (and will have to pay)
What most people should actually do: they send you a scary letter, you tell them to audit you, usually they’ll stop here, if they audit you and make a final assessment against you, you tell them you want to go to court, they’ll almost definitely drop it at this point, unless you actually owe them taxes and it’s such an easy and big case that they are willing to go through the trouble
Most people will just amend their return forms and pay, because it’s just too scary to even think of going against these agencies
Sent me a letter saying that because I had filed my federal return with my Arkansas address I clearly lived in the state, and because I hadn't filed a state return they were assessing taxes on me for the entire year at the single rate.
I called and they said the same thing, I interrupted them and said "so should I tell California to fight you over this money, since I lived there until (XX/YY/ZZZZ)?" Oh and here's my AR lease, here's my CA lease, my CA tax return, me transferring my license to an AR drivers license, and me transferring my vehicle registration on (XX/YY/ZZZZ). Anything else I can help you get from the state, since you don't seem to have access, but do from the feds.
I got the most sheepish "this case is resolved" letter from them <72 hours later.
Perhaps you have had a different experience but the IRS has always been polite and helpful in the few cases where I had income tax disputes. The key is to follow the process instead of trying to argue with bureaucrats or treat them as enemies.
Compliance deadlines are measured in months. You have plenty of time to mail responses. Usually they'll put a hold on collection activities while you have a dispute pending.
It depends on the situation. They might be polite but unwilling to budge on the issue.
My mother had a problem back before "identity theft" became a common term. Apparently someone used her SS# with their employer. The IRS was coming after her about the unreported income. Hey, that's not mine! Contact your employer and get it fixed. I've never heard of them let alone worked for them and I can't find them, can you give me their address? (This was pre-internet.) No, we aren't allowed to, you need to get it fixed.
I went off to college at that point and never learned how it ended up.
Similarly with the British system, especially the disability system. You have to fill in a 160-page form and turn up to an appointment. They interpret everything you have written on the form as evidence of ability, including turning up to the appointment itself. Ability to fill in a form and turn up to an appointment is used as evidence that you should be capable of having a job, and are therefore ineligible for help. You are denied.
You then take the case to tribunal, where it is put in front of a normal non-rigged judge who interprets the law in a reasonable manner, and are awarded your disability benefits.
This process takes about a year and is basically impossible unless you get help from someone who is "professional managerial class" enough to work the system for you.
Coda: periodically they write to you to check that e.g. the two legs you lost have not grown back. This must also be dealt with.
Sounds about like my understanding of how disability works in the US, also. If you have one clear-cut showstopper it's not a problem but anything else expect to be denied and you probably have to hire a lawyer.
> So all in all, Germany still has homeless people, despite welfare programs generous enough in principle that no one needs to be homeless.
One of the reasons is that for being part of those programs, the people have to want to be re-integrated, leave out any kind of drugs that there were using, take part in employment trainings,... and not everyone is keen in going through that and rather stay on the streets.
I would formulate it slightly more cynically: to be part of many programs you have to go through the right motions so that the civil servant in charge can tick the box that says 'wants to be re-integrated' etc.
If you are literate enough with bureaucracy and paperwork, that's not too much of a hassle; and they can't really look into your heart and see that you'd really rather sit at home, collect welfare and play computer games, compared to working a low paying, entry-level job.
But the skills that make this dissembling easy are also the same skills that make holding down many kinds of job easy. Especially low level, white collar jobs. Conversely, the people who can't get nor keep a job or also likely to lack these skills and preferences for playing the bureaucracy.
The welfare system requires more than a minimal amount of paperwork, and a lot of people are surprisingly bad with paperwork. Then you have immigrants who don't have access to this system, or are afraid to use it.
> "a lot of people are surprisingly bad with paperwork."
I guess you're writing for a class of people for whom this is easier. But perhaps a more informative view of the situation, rather than saying "people are bad at this" may instead be to realise that if you're able to deal with this sort of stuff without issue, you are very likely in the minority (very few are as good at this as us). This can perhaps inform how you feel about certain requirements for certain programs.
As an illustrative example, a great many otherwise highly capable people who are able to write impressive art or fiction (including for example, many famous musicians and authors) struggle mightily with contracts and managers on the regular.
> (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money)
IME it's more complicated than that.
Firstly, the NHS allows consultants to do private work, making use of NHS resources, including beds, radiography and theatres. Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue".
I would never rely on a private hospital. They never have an emergency department, and emergencies happen in hospitals too. Many private hospitals can only treat certain types of case; I wouldn't want to be stuck in a hospital that couldn't treat anything that happened to me.
> Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue".
The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue, so I'm not sure how they're jumping anything.
The real problem is that private healthcare over-treats people with unnecessary surgery, and cherrypicks the easy stuff, but dumps patients back into NHS care as soon as they get complex.
> The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue
This is not true.
I went to the NHS over my kid's glue-ear. We had to see a consultant, but the earliest appointment was 9 months, and the hearing problem was impeding our child's language acquisition. So we went private, and had an appointment with the consultant in a few weeks. The consultant recommended surgery to install grommets (wow!), and a few weeks later we attended for NHS surgery, to be performed by the same consultant.
This was 30 years ago; but I've been told recently (a couple of days ago) that this still goes on.
Singapore has many systems, rules and laws that would not and could not work elsewhere. It's great that it works for them, but it doesn't work in the USA, or most other countries. I will point out that they are an affluent, monocultural, somewhat xenophobic, authoritarian and borderline fascist city-state.
Singapore has only recently become affluent, mostly thanks to hard work by the locals, but also partially thanks to policies that did not discourage people from putting in that hard work.
I'm not sure what you mean by monocultural? Singapore is famously multicultural.
Singapore is very open to foreigners. Almost no one's family has been here for longer than three or four generations. I'm not sure where you get xenophobic from? (However, they do like some foreigners more than others. Just like in the rest of the world, people who came from affluent places to spend money are typically the most welcome visitors.)
Authoritarian might be true, depending on your definition of the world. To call them 'borderline fascist' you'd need a rather torturous definition of fascism (or a generous definition of borderline).
Yes, Singapore is a city-state. For comparison, Berlin and Hamburg are also city states in the federal system of Germany and enjoy considerable autonomy, but with less success. I agree that more cities should become independent and be better run as city-states. London would be an interesting candidate.
> To call them 'borderline fascist' you'd need a rather torturous definition of fascism (or a generous definition of borderline).
Does hanging people arrested with small enough amounts of drugs that you'd get a relatively minor punishment in the U.S. not at least toe the borderline of fascism?
not really. fascism isn't just "doles out severe punishments." It's a slightly tired trope to trot out Umberto Eco's definitions of fascism but suffice to say it's a name for a political tendancy that appeals heavily to imagined glorious history and family while stoking fear of a destabilising influence within society, taken to extremes. It usually also emphasises emergency needing reliance on strong leaders and distain for comittee and taking time to make right decisions that work for everyone.
Sometimes people get all upset when they hear some of these characterisations, because they personally think family ought to be more important, or that people are ignoring a proud shared history. Maybe they feel that beuracracy and comittee meetings have led to overcomplexity. It turns out as with anything else these things are perfectly fine and not bad until this way of thinking becomes the sole goal of the leading class, they become highly authoritarian, and it lashes out more and more at any percieved imperfection in society regardless of severity.
Does this fit with singapore, to a greater or lesser extent? I really don't know. But I understand why people would feel annoyed by simplifying it down to "strong laws against drugs"
> Does hanging people arrested with small enough amounts of drugs that you'd get a relatively minor punishment in the U.S. not at least toe the borderline of fascism?
No. Why?
Singapore goes up to the death penalty for trading in drugs. Consumers of drugs face punishment, but not the death penalty.
In any case, harsh punishment does not make anything fascist (nor does comparatively lax punishment make something not fascist).
Eg the US is not fascist, despite them handing out harsher sentences for eg drug offenses than other parts of the world (or even the US itself at different points in time).
(Just to be clear: I like living in my adopted home of Singapore. I disagree with their drug policies, and think drugs in general even 'hard' ones should mostly be taxed, not banned. But I don't harsh punishments for some behaviour is a sign of fascism. Especially if the laws are clear and knowable, and there's a scrupulous legal system that predictably enforces these laws for all without prejudice.)
> Does hanging people arrested with small enough amounts of drugs that you'd get a relatively minor punishment in the U.S. not at least toe the borderline of fascism?
No.
Fascism, of course, tends to incorporate harsh punishments for (at least some) criminals, but that's neither central to fascism nor is it sufficient for fascism, you don't get anywhere near the borderline of fascism just with ahesh criminal punishments forbthings that are widely criminalized in liberal regimes.
It may be bad, but not all bad things are fascist.
Fascism is very specifically about about the subordination of all competing spheres to the State. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
No, it's well known to everyone everywhere that trafficking drugs into Singapore will get you a death sentence. Those drugs destroy families, they absolutely destroy families.
Singapore may be many of those things but it's not "monocultural". Besides the fact that it has 4 official languages, foreigners make up about 30% of the resident population - a much higher portion than the USA, for example!
> [...] foreigners make up about 30% of the resident population - a much higher portion than the USA, for example!
I mostly disagree with acyou's comment, but since Singapore is a city as much as a state, the more enlightening comparison might be with how many of eg New York City's residents were born out of town? (Or perhaps how many of NYC's residents were born out of the country? It's murky, and there might not be one best comparison.)
In any case, I agree that Singapore is not 'monocultural'.
To push your point a bit further, my high school History teacher (I went to HS in NYC), would constantly remind us that New York was nothing like the rest of America.
I think they're using this to mean "doesn't have a visible ethnically different underclass". Such a thing would never be allowed to be visible in Singapore.
That is such a common pattern. Growing up, I saw the same happen with the German welfare system: there's enough of a social safety net in that country that no one would have to be homeless. But, to access the social safety net, you have to navigate some minimal amount of bureaucracy and paperwork.
That bar isn't very high, but if you have at least that minimal skill with paperwork literacy, you are also much more likely to have a job and much less likely to need the welfare.
So all in all, Germany still has homeless people, despite welfare programs generous enough in principle that no one needs to be homeless.
Addendum: Singapore has an ingenious system to ration the amount of subsidies you get on hospital bills without any bureaucracy. The basic idea is that when you go for a hospital stay, you get to pick how much etxra creature comforts you are getting, like your own private room vs an open word with many beds. The copay for the fancier options rises 'progressively' enough, that the absolute amount of government subsidy goes down. People tend to self-sort voluntarily.
The medical care you receive is the same for any of the options.
I can imagine an argument that this is somehow against the dignity of poor people to put them into comparatively crowded wards, and that everyone should get the same treatment (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money). But I suspect many of the poorer people are happier to put up with that 'indignity' than with paperwork and privacy-invading bureaucratic means testing.
In total, adding up private and public expenditures, Singapore spends about half as much on healthcare as a proportion of GDP than the UK does, which spends about half as much as the US. Medical outcomes are no worse in the cheaper systems.