Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel

The state and local governments that shutdown did the right thing - they put the health and safety of their populations first. The federal government failed them by defaulting on its obligations. It did this intentionally.

There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.

I think that much of this kind of stupid discourse on HN is driven by thiel-worshipping reactionaries who believe weird theories about why their genes make them better than black people, but another huge part of it seems to be literally fourteen year old libertarians. Which are you?

How can you possibly say this is mere paranoia in the face of an active, ongoing attempt by both the President and a huge portion of the institutional GOP to do exactly that?

The current attempt to steal the election is bound to fail, but it's setting up the GOP playbook for stealing a closer, more plausibly contested presidential election.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25365296

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