> You also get a housing subsidy, but only for particular housing, which isn't as close to your job or doesn't allow you to pool resources with roommates, so now you have to pay more for transportation or most of the subsidy gets eaten by higher rents etc.
Yeah the subsidies also will not cover the entire cost of housing. So you probably have to drive a lot farther than someone else who is not using welfare to pay for the same kind of housing.
A lot of welfare stuff looks like a great deal when you put an amount on it but completely falls apart when you look at how challenging it is to access and what the conditions are around continuing in the program. It gets to the degree that getting that extra $40-50k a year requires you to give up a LOT. And it's a full time job to maintain. So you have to do all of that on top of your full time job, often with agencies who have no hours after work. And god help you if you have to show up somewhere regularly to pick something up.
As a bonus nuking welfare and replacing it with UBI would help a lot of the chronically homeless because it would allow them to get assistance without needing to have a permanent physical address.
> It gets to the degree that getting that extra $40-50k a year requires you to give up a LOT.
And it's still costing the taxpayer ~$45k -- more than that, because the government has its own administrative overhead on top of that.
But people still use it, because they're doing $30k in work to get $45k in benefits, it's just that they were supposed to be getting $45k in benefits. Which the taxpayer is still paying for even though the net benefit is far less.
The people asking how to pay for it haven't understood the math. If you subtract both the government's administrative overhead and the recipient's, we could provide a higher level of true benefits to people and still lower taxes on everyone else, just by splitting the efficiency gains between them.
Yeah the subsidies also will not cover the entire cost of housing. So you probably have to drive a lot farther than someone else who is not using welfare to pay for the same kind of housing.
A lot of welfare stuff looks like a great deal when you put an amount on it but completely falls apart when you look at how challenging it is to access and what the conditions are around continuing in the program. It gets to the degree that getting that extra $40-50k a year requires you to give up a LOT. And it's a full time job to maintain. So you have to do all of that on top of your full time job, often with agencies who have no hours after work. And god help you if you have to show up somewhere regularly to pick something up.
As a bonus nuking welfare and replacing it with UBI would help a lot of the chronically homeless because it would allow them to get assistance without needing to have a permanent physical address.