Slashdot Mirror
How Techies Rescued Food Stamps (wired.com)
New submitter rgh02 writes: There is an endless variety of apps designed to manage life for the upper middle class, but most low-income Americans don't benefit from the same time-saving hacks. Thanks to new trends in civic technology, that's beginning to change. The 43 million Americans depending on food stamps are seeing the introduction of apps like Propel's Fresh EBT, which allows users to check balances, track deals, and organize budgets accordingly. And Propel is only one of several companies looking to disrupt outdated social programs, Tonya Riley reports at Backchannel. But the Trump administration, with its hiring freezes and budget cuts, poses threats to these advancements. Riley dives deep into the progress that's been made and how companies are navigating these obstacles.
2. One argument against making social programs like food stamps easier...is that making them a PAIN IN THE ASS might help encourage folks to double down on work and education,
It is a dumb argument. By making benefits only for the "truly poor" you create a poverty trap.
Yes, over-generous welfare systems are indeed a poverty trap. They tend to keep people poor by encouraging them to remain eligible for the government hand-out rather than obtain a new job.
As people start to do a little better, they lose their benefits, pulling them back down.
They lose their benefits because benefits are replaced with a paycheck. Becoming self-sufficient is the opposite of being pulled down.
That's great, taking a hand-out from government is being raised up and working for yourself is being pulled down. Only liberals . . .
So the incentives are exactly backwards.
Actually, the existing, natural incentives work just fine -- if you don't work, you starve. As with most everything, liberals pervert the natural system of incentives by perpetually supporting those who would otherwise have supported themselves -- keeping them down.