Insights into life with government support

We are not the 1%. Maybe the 4%? Relatively wealthy. Lots of degrees. Decades of education. Resources.

So we shouldn’t know much about life with government support. We have children with cognitive disadvantages though, so we do. They live in the government support world (in large part because, fairly soon, we will be dead).

Among the things we have learned:

  1. There is an immense amount of paperwork to complete — and it never ends.
  2. Critical paperwork constantly gets lost. Perhaps a 25% loss rate? This part surprises.
  3. Every time someone exploits a weakness a new rule is glued on, the system gets more brittle, and error rates rise.
  4. Nobody knows how it all works. There are numerous conflicting models of the system but they are all incomplete and inconsistent.

This has a lot in common with American health care (though the paper loss rate is worse). The root causes may be similar, we Americans seem to be unusually good at creating large scale dysfunctional systems.

Perhaps one of our Celestials will fund a research program into why we do so badly.