Mastodawn

Androcat Aug 2, 2023

Gentle reminder: Whenever someone is trying to sell you a story about welfare fraud, they're actually just trying to make it harder for deserving applicants to get the help they need.

Stories about welfare fraud are 100% about making it hard for people to get help.
Measures to combat fraud all amount to making the walls higher.
There is absolutely zero effort made to check whether it reduces valid applications, and also zero effort made to check whether it reduces fraudulent applications.

So, next time someone wants to tell you about "social scrounging" or whatever fancy-ass vocab they've made up for their bullshit, just tell them to go fuck themselves, in the nicest possible way.

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दुःख блядь Aug 25, 2023

@androcat Talked to a lady who worked for the tax authority here in Norway once. She told me straight away that welfare fraud is such a minor phenomenon that it has zero effect on the welfare budget. She followed that up by saying, "So we need to decide what kind of society we want - one where we're so afraid that someone might get some help they didn't qualify for, at the risk of depriving many others who need that help? Or one where we help folks through tough times and help them become tax payers again?"
A year or two later, I read a study that showed a significant amount of "welfare fraud" cases are folks who genuinely believed they qualified.
The more accessible benefits are, the better for everyone, ultimately.

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Matt Tearle

@souvlaki @androcat

THIS 👆

This is basically just Type I vs Type II errors/specificity vs sensitivity/false positives vs negatives/etc. In the real world, you can’t eliminate all errors, so you have to decide which is worse.

That was the realization I had after a few years in the US: the voters for one political party can’t stomach the idea of someone “undeserving” getting “their” money. So much so that they’d happily accept a whole pile of people getting screwed (as long as those people are someone else, of course).