In Hypothetical Public Policy Imagination Land, There Is No Simplicity/Precision Tradeoff!
But on Earth, there is
Generally speaking, I’m a fan of articles that blame things on the public. Those articles are rare; it’s always easier to blame things on feckless politicians, greedy corporations, and craven members of the media. To write an article suggesting that some fault might lie with the people who cast the votes, buy the products, and provide the clicks — the people who are your audience — is incredibly risky. But every now and then, someone sticks their head above the parapet and says “maybe — hear me out — you’re part of the problem?” It’s a bold gambit, and I privately salute it, while publicly saying: “How dare you.”
It matters what the public thinks and knows. Of course, we need to be realistic about what people should be expected to know. Those of us who write about politics for a living often forget that this is our entire job; expecting people to know the fine details of policy is exactly as reasonable as expecting me to know how to repair an impacted molar even though I’m not a goddamned…what do you call them? Tooth guy. (I looked it up: dentist.) It might be fair to expect people to know the essential stuff, like that there are three branches of government or that LBJ had a special shower installed in the White House to power-wash his balls, but there are limits to what people can know.
One thing I wish everyone knew is that there’s a tradeoff between precision and simplicity in the design of social programs. That is: You can take steps to funnel money to the people you think should get it, or you can not do that and spare people some paperwork, but it’s very hard to do both. If you already knew that, then whoopdee-fucking-do for you, Professor Think Tank: I give you permission to skip this article and watch this compilation of epic basketball trick shots instead. My singular goal here is to simply establish that there is a tradeoff.
And for what it’s worth: Even think tank-y types sometimes act like there’s not.
My initial sympathies on this topic were with the “precision” side of the argument. I am, after all, a technocratic liberal with a background in economics, so my tolerance for complexity is roughly equivalent to Keith Richards’ tolerance for drugs. With only a few small changes to my life, I could imagine becoming a person who loudly advocates for switching to metric time.
The logic behind having a process to determine who gets what aid is obvious: Most aid is supposed to be situation-dependent. You get unemployment insurance if you’re unemployed. You get food stamps if you need food. When liberals talk about having a “safety net” or “sanding off the rough edges off of capitalism”, this is what we’re talking about: Having a system in place so that, if the economic winds turn against you, it’s not disastrous. We want people to be able to recover from a bad break — these programs are basically insurance.
Many people feel strongly that anyone who can work should work. And I am one of those people. I think liberals do ourselves a disservice by dismissing how viscerally annoying freeriders can be. We should never lose sight of the fact that work profoundly sucks, it’s hard, it’s annoying, it starts way too early, and any adult who works a full-time job will spend a certain portion of their life wondering if their existence is substantially different from that of a coal mine horse. With that being true, anyone who works has every right to be pissed if their labor makes it possible for someone else to sit on their ass.
If I could wave a wand and sort people into piles labeled “deserving” and “undeserving”, I would do that. But that’s not possible, and many of the things we’ve tried to determine who’s deserving of aid and who isn’t haven’t worked. Studies of past attempts to attach work requirements to SNAP (food stamps), TANF (welfare), and Medicaid (Medicaid) typically find that they reduced the number of participants but had little to no effect on employment.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s a conservative stereotype of people using food stamps to buy lobster, which always makes me think: Where are people supposedly finding this cut-rate lobster that you can buy with food stamps? Is this some Groupon scam, where you have to buy 100 pounds of lobster on Leap Day under a full moon, or is this just a radiated crawdad that we’re calling “lobster”? Because the average SNAP benefit is about $121 per person per month, which will buy you three Red Lobster Seafarer’s Feasts and a Pepsi1 a month, but no cheddar bay biscuits and who the fuck goes to Red Lobster and doesn’t get biscuits?
What I’m saying is: We’re almost never talking about enough money to seriously affect anyone’s decision whether to work or not. $121 in food stamps per month or a $250 child tax credit isn’t a ticket to Easy Street. It’s still in people’s interest to work because a job gives you money. And money can be used to buy things, such as those cheddar bay biscuits that you can’t get with food stamps.
Trying to make aid programs more precise also adds bureaucracy. This imposes a very real cost — navigating bureaucracy costs time, money, and — most of all — sanity. I once cut my hand with a chisel, and the pain of dealing with my insurance was ten times worse than the gash that sent me to the ER. Whenever I call Verizon, within ten minutes I find myself screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!” at a computer at the top of my lungs. I will never understand why I have to give my address seven times on the forms at my — what do you call him? — tooth guy’s office, nor do I know why they need to know that I’m divorced. Do boxes for “married” and “single” not cut it? You really need to know that I’m divorced? If that’s so essential, then how about a line below that says: “Tell us whose fault it was.”
The argument against making people jump through hoops to determine who should get aid and who shouldn’t isn’t a principled argument; it’s a practical one. The studies I linked to above make it clear that some work requirements basically sort people according to their ability to navigate the system, not according to their willingness to work. Meanwhile, we add hassle and administrative costs, to the point that there often aren’t any real “savings”. It’s true that the old version of welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was horribly designed and really did encourage people to not work, because work wouldn’t get them more money, and obviously nobody works at Domino’s for the love of the game. That system is gone. Past efforts to keep aid away from undeserving people have been imprecise and added administrative costs. The desire to make aid programs more precise is understandable, but often, the squeeze just isn’t worth the juice.
With this being true, why not make things simple and trash means testing and bureaucracy altogether? Some people argue for that. And, as you can probably tell, I’m sympathetic. But, ultimately, I think that the perfectly-simple approach fails for much the same reason that the perfectly-precise approach does: It struggles when it comes into contact with the real world.
The logic behind the perfectly-simple approach is basically this: Instead of creating a systems of means testing and eligibility requirements, just cut everyone a check. Sure, you’ll send some checks to people who don’t need them, but you solve that problem with highly-progressive taxes. So, instead of, say, a food stamp benefit that only goes to the poor, everyone gets X dollars a month for food. And, yes, it’s weird to mail Jeff Bezos a check for $121 — though the thought of him driving to CitiBank and waiting in line to cash a $121 check is pretty funny — but we’re taxing him at 70 percent so we’re not going to sweat that $121.
This has some elegance. It basically subjects everyone to one, big means test — taxes — and that determines how much you pay for your Box O’ Government Benefits. And all you need to do to receive your Box O’ Benefits is have a pulse. Which is great, because I know a few people who basically have that and only that going for them.
I will aggressively stump for a system quite a bit like this in Hypothetical Public Policy Imagination Land. Oh won’t you join me in Hypothetical Public Policy Imagination Land! The trees are made of white papers, and a griffin with Paul Krugman’s head dispenses justice! It even has — you won’t believe this — a carbon tax! It is truly a magical place!
Of course, the distance between Hypothetical Public Policy Imagination Land and Earth is a billion light years. Here on Earth, raising taxes — even on the wealthy — is incredibly tough. This reality has forced Democrats to star in a drama that’s basically Public Policy Sophie’s Choice, though the metaphor would work better if Sophie had seven kids and got to pick her favorite two, and she also promised to abandon one kid in a year with the hope that she could work around that later.
Since this is true, crafting policy with an eye towards precision — that is, means testing — seems like the way to go. You’ll want to make sure the added hassle produces real savings, of course, and means testing requires everyone to file taxes, so some people who are eligible for benefits won’t get them, and that truly does suck. But the alternative is to spend limited resources on benefits for people who don’t need them.
It’s usually progressives who are against means testing. This puts them in the odd position of advocating for benefits for the wealthy. I honestly find it bizarre when far-left progressives push for, say, universal student loan forgiveness instead of selective student loan forgiveness; I see that as a right-wing position, because the benefits go mostly to the rich. It’s as if Mike Pence had advocated a bill called the Rim Job Facilitation Act — it would be fair to wonder if he really know what he was calling for.
The phrase that’s often invoked to explain why benefits should go to everyone, including the wealthy, is: “Programs for the poor become poor programs.” I’ve really come to dislike this phrase; it seems, at this point, to be more of an incantation than an argument. For starters, I don’t think it’s true; personally, I really like Medicaid and the Earned-Income Tax Credit, and I just wish they were bigger. Moreover, I have a pet peeve about how we assume that sayings are true as long as they’re a bit clever or rhyme. Like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” — that is obviously not true! Anyone making fruit-based medical decisions is going to die!
I often feel like part of what’s going on is that people like the sweeping definitiveness of “________ for ALL” or “universal ________”. Now that’s a fun thing to campaign on — it’s a radical change! Not some technocratic horseshit that’s weighed down by forms. And, again, I agree that forms are bad; I spent the first half of this article complaining about forms. But: 1) Some types of means testing are more onerous than others (requiring people to file a tax form is not that bad), and 2) In a world with finite resources, if I have to choose between getting one program to everybody or two programs to the poor, I’m choosing the latter.
In the short term, it would obviously help to make things simpler where we can. The People’s Policy Project has recommended that the Social Security Administration, not the IRS, administer the new child benefit, and I think that’s a good idea. Outreach helps people know which benefits they’re eligible for. Also, filing a single tax form should determine your eligibility for as many benefits as possible. Even in Hypothetical Public Policy Imagination Land, people file tax forms, so as burdens go, that one’s not very big.
In a world with perfect information, you could funnel aid directly to deserving people with no administrative costs. In a world with perfect politics, you could design a system with automatic benefits that’s as progressive as you like. Neither of those options are on the table in our world. In our world, there’s a pretty-concrete tradeoff between precision and simplicity in social spending. And that — along with the fact that LBJ’s shower also had a high-pressure nozzle that would shoot up his ass — is a fact that I think everyone should know.
This is just a joke; you can’t buy restaurant food with food stamps. You can buy unprepared food and in a few rare cases you can spend it on a deli sandwich.
This was great and cracked me up... the radiated crawfish made me laugh out loud.
However I personally favor giving money to everyone and then taxing the wealthy. Programs that benefit everyone get more support—and I believe it’s better to err on the side of helping people vs. using means testing that is often outdated (a lot changed after people’s 2019 taxes).
Our income is right around the amount where the stimulus and child tax credit phase out. We got a reduced amount for the first round and nothing for the second. It was demoralizing to find out that we didn’t qualify when our friends were celebrating on social media. (We are fine without it but could use the money. For one thing, our minimum student loan payments are $48k per year.)
A check would have been a nice psychological boost—even if the full amount got added to our taxes later. Or better yet, just tax us at a high rate in general so we don’t notice we’re paying it back.
I... came here to say something pithy about means testing, but have now lost my train of thought and can only ask: is "sex model" a way to evade machine-learning-based comment moderation, a non-native-English-speaking idiosyncrasy, or a new euphemism release from the language police that I somehow missed?
Uh, anyway. I agree with you that it's probably practical to have some kind of means testing, and I highly endorse the idea of automatically flagging people for all income-based assistance they qualify for once they're in the system, but I don't love the idea of it being a tax form. I seem to recall a few articles that point to lower-income people getting audited disproportionately, and it's way harder than it needs to be to file -- even if your return is simple (which it won't be if you've got more than one crappy job or are working intermittently). If you go to TurboTax, for example, it's (deliberately) not straightforward to file for free despite being heavily advertised as fast & easy. Since there's been talk about simplifying taxes my entire lifetime, I don't see that changing anytime soon so I'd rather have something separate.