On This Day Pre-Y2K
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April 9, 1999 Permalink
While the problem of welfare in large part depends on how it’s defined, the problem of welfare bureaucracy is solvable... change the welfare laws and administrative regulations to a form easily administered by computer and automate the bureaucracy out of business... i.e. reduce and simplify the sheer mass of the regulations to something that’ll fit on a floppy instead of multiple CDROMs, make them internally consistent... (Kind of the relationship between Netscape and Opera, but quite a bit more so.)
However, in scenarios between “bump in the road” and TEOTWAKI, I think that’s going to be an inevitable result of the recession / Depression that will happen.
To be specific, “bump in the road” = business as usual... TEOTWAKI, we don’t have Federal and probably don’t have state governments, in the inbetween cases, we get massive unemployment AND government relief programs... and to keep things managable with limited governmental resources, I think that welfare and unemployment are going to HAVE to be lumped together.
It’s cheaper to maintain welfare bureaucrats on welfare than paying them salaries, fringe benefits, and providing them with office space and computer access.
—A.Lizard, comp.software.year-2000, 04/09/99
