Has it worked well for France? I’ve been arguing that such an approach would work much better for the US.
Using self-identified racial identities for aid programs is too easy to argue is itself racially biased. Even if you can make good contextual arguments that race-based aid is a compensation for race-based oppression, either current or historical, that’s not a winning political position.
Using metrics like generational wealth, income, education is a much easier argument to make, even if in effect it would disproportionately benefit these identity groups.
The primary downside seems to be that administering such a program is more complicated, which means more of the expense goes to overhead, and more people will not get the benefits they could because of the difficulty of navigating a more complex process.
The primary downside seems to be that administering such a program is more complicated, which means more of the expense goes to overhead, and more people will not get the benefits they could because of the difficulty of navigating a more complex process.
Is that so? I’d think the income tax form should tell you those things.
Fwiw, Europeans would look at you funny if you were to ask them to tick Caucasian/Black/Asian/… on random government forms. This data literally doesn’t exist [here] in any consistent way, except [maybe] for criminal suspects.
Yeah but how do you get the information from the IRS into the systems that manage this hypothetical program? How do you get your parents’ and grandparents’ IRS data correlated with your own? What about people who don’t file taxes? The risk is that all that work falls on the applicant. Or if the program administrators do all that work, that’s where the overhead costs come in.
This is something which happens with existing public assistance programs, where so many requirements have been put on the aid application that people give up trying to to prove they made less than X dollars in the last 12 months, or lived in the state for at least 5 years, or have passed a drug screening, and so on. Too often that’s done intentionally to stymie a program, but the phenomenon exists regardless of motivation. The more complicated the program requirement are, the more people will fail to get aid they should, and the more it costs to administer.
Yeah but how do you get the information from the IRS into the systems that manage this hypothetical program?
Quite honestly, there should be various options. I guess IRS could run such a program itself. Alternatively, the US has SSNs as a universal ID and IRS could send over required data organized by SSN.
What about people who don’t file taxes?
I don’t know but that’s probably solvable.
The risk is that all that work falls on the applicant. Or if the program administrators do all that work, that’s where the overhead costs come in.
I am not convinced by that. An administrator-run program with a simple methodology and a good data basis might be a lot more efficient than an application-based program inviting human error and long back-and-forths.
I fail to understand your reasoning, France is less liberal than USA the state is rather strong and they directly tax most salaries upfront of it being paid each month, they know all your property in France as these are all registered.
Generally they monitor your bank account via the bank themselves that are controlled a lot so they know your income and taxes are prefilled in France. Since most of my income is my salary I have basically never filled taxes I just verify and click accept each year.
So yeah it is not difficult for them to implement such programs and it a much more easy and factual data to collect than ‘is this person a minority’
I think it works in some ways, there are tones of people who graduate university every year without having to pay for the diploma and getting money to live on top of that (bourse), based on household revenue. We still have a problem of reproduced inequalities, educated people marry each other and their kids are much more likely to graduate from top schools, but maybe it’s worse in the USA. I don’t hear the conservatives or (populist) far right criticizing this social system, they are more focused on immigration, so I guess the non-ethnicity based public help is good at avoiding this politization.
This sounds like Trump’s dream country.
If you think it’s because there’s no help programs for minorities, there are, but it is usually based on the revenue of the household or the district.
Has it worked well for France? I’ve been arguing that such an approach would work much better for the US.
Using self-identified racial identities for aid programs is too easy to argue is itself racially biased. Even if you can make good contextual arguments that race-based aid is a compensation for race-based oppression, either current or historical, that’s not a winning political position.
Using metrics like generational wealth, income, education is a much easier argument to make, even if in effect it would disproportionately benefit these identity groups.
The primary downside seems to be that administering such a program is more complicated, which means more of the expense goes to overhead, and more people will not get the benefits they could because of the difficulty of navigating a more complex process.
Is that so? I’d think the income tax form should tell you those things.
Fwiw, Europeans would look at you funny if you were to ask them to tick Caucasian/Black/Asian/… on random government forms. This data literally doesn’t exist [here] in any consistent way, except [maybe] for criminal suspects.
Yeah but how do you get the information from the IRS into the systems that manage this hypothetical program? How do you get your parents’ and grandparents’ IRS data correlated with your own? What about people who don’t file taxes? The risk is that all that work falls on the applicant. Or if the program administrators do all that work, that’s where the overhead costs come in.
This is something which happens with existing public assistance programs, where so many requirements have been put on the aid application that people give up trying to to prove they made less than X dollars in the last 12 months, or lived in the state for at least 5 years, or have passed a drug screening, and so on. Too often that’s done intentionally to stymie a program, but the phenomenon exists regardless of motivation. The more complicated the program requirement are, the more people will fail to get aid they should, and the more it costs to administer.
Quite honestly, there should be various options. I guess IRS could run such a program itself. Alternatively, the US has SSNs as a universal ID and IRS could send over required data organized by SSN.
I don’t know but that’s probably solvable.
I am not convinced by that. An administrator-run program with a simple methodology and a good data basis might be a lot more efficient than an application-based program inviting human error and long back-and-forths.
I fail to understand your reasoning, France is less liberal than USA the state is rather strong and they directly tax most salaries upfront of it being paid each month, they know all your property in France as these are all registered. Generally they monitor your bank account via the bank themselves that are controlled a lot so they know your income and taxes are prefilled in France. Since most of my income is my salary I have basically never filled taxes I just verify and click accept each year. So yeah it is not difficult for them to implement such programs and it a much more easy and factual data to collect than ‘is this person a minority’
I think it works in some ways, there are tones of people who graduate university every year without having to pay for the diploma and getting money to live on top of that (bourse), based on household revenue. We still have a problem of reproduced inequalities, educated people marry each other and their kids are much more likely to graduate from top schools, but maybe it’s worse in the USA. I don’t hear the conservatives or (populist) far right criticizing this social system, they are more focused on immigration, so I guess the non-ethnicity based public help is good at avoiding this politization.
Right-wingers have decried this system for a while now. They’re convinced it’s designed to hide the fact that brown people commit more crime and such.
Maybe right wingers just like to bitch about everything