Quote Originally Posted by Lord McBuckethead View Post
Yep. Means testing is a major issue with all welfare systems, but dammit if a large portion of our country just cannot stand someone getting something for free when it isn't them or their family. youtube channel 2 cents just had a video on means testing and the welfare system keeping people poor. Almost impossible to break out of the cycle, because at a certain limit that isn't a comfortable living, a person losses so much assistance it is prohibitive for them to grow.
That's not really a problem with means testing. It's a problem of us spreading out welfare over dozens of programs and administering them separately. You are going to have pretty high imputed tax rates (>50%) if you phase out benefits over a reasonable income range, but we could easily avoid them approaching 100% if we had central administration for all our welfare benefits and designed them to make sense together.