Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 128 posts

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#91

Post by tylerhou »

refurb wrote: post #54
typon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are so concerned with accidentally helping someone who doesn't deserve it that they'd rather sacrifice the well being of millions who do

Unemployment in CA went $23B in debt because of Covid (spent more in benefits than collected). $11B is estimated to be fraud. Your statement is quite trite to be honest.

What are you trying to advocate for; making it much harder to receive unemployment benefits? Then your statement demonstrates the exact point the parent commenter is trying to make.

89% of payments weren't considered fraudulent. I.e. it seems like you're suggesting that you'd rather sacrifice the well-being of the millions of people who received legitimate unemployment benefits just to prevent payments to a relatively small percentage of people who don't deserve them.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-25/californ...

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#92

Post by creato »

WarChortle wrote: post #80
BitwiseFool wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Americans are so concerned with accidentally helping someone who doesn't deserve it that they'd rather sacrifice the well being of millions who do" This reads like hyperbole and cynicism. Americans as a whole donate a large amount to charity each year and the United States already has wide-ranging social welfare programs. I challenge the use of the word "accidentally", because there are legitimate concerns about de…

I am speaking in generalities because I don't know your exact stance on everything. The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments. In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to…

35 trillion is almost double the entire GDP of the US, and almost 10x the entire federal budget. I don't know where you are getting that number.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#93

Post by jazzyjackson »

creato wrote: post #92
WarChortle wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am speaking in generalities because I don't know your exact stance on everything. The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments. In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to…

35 trillion is almost double the entire GDP of the US, and almost 10x the entire federal budget. I don't know where you are getting that number.

Accounting adjustments, see https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion/ (one of many sources)

“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”

However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#94

Post by pdonis »

mschuster91 wrote: post #89
pdonis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything is sacrificing the well-being of poor Americans who deserve better, it is the fact that helping them is punted to government bureaucracies instead of being done by private individuals and charitable organizations who are both able and motivated to exercise much better judgment about who needs help and what help is needed than any government bureaucrat can possibly do.

> instead of being done by private individuals and charitable organizations Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism , not democracy. We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites. Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to b…

> Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism, not democracy

No, it isn't, it's freedom. Your definition of "democracy" is basically that if a 50.1% majority feels like it, they can commandeer your resources as they see fit. That is tyranny, not democracy.

> We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.

If you think there are people who deserve help and are not being helped by existing organizations, you start an organization to help them. If a democratic majority agrees with you that those people deserve help and aren't getting it, you'll have no trouble getting donations.

> Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!

And if you think government-run programs actually do what the "democratically decided criteria" say they are supposed to do, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you. Anyone who has actually had to deal with these government-run programs (as my wife and I have for years, both on behalf of friends who are constantly getting the runaround from bureaucratic screw-ups and from my wife's experience as a social worker) will tell you that they are terrible at actually helping people.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#95

Post by marijnz0r »

cycomanic wrote: post #27
shakna wrote: post #12

> In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People such as Bamaze, with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. 10 days from incepti…

The issue is that in the west, and particular in the US, being poor is considered a character flaw. Rudger Bergman goes into a bit of detail on the history of that perception, which he attributes to the opposition against Nixon's UBI (at least in the US). So what we now have in many western nations is a huge bureaucratic body to prevent fraud on social security systems which at the same time significantly increase hu…

Rutger Bregman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutger_Bregman

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#96

Post by shakna »

gruez wrote: post #62
shakna wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The potential for malevolence in a country the size of Togo is limited, but I'd rather not have the same processes in my own country. The potential for building more advanced fraud protection systems also scales with the nation being discussed. Especially when you consider that the world's largest fraud protection experts are already operating within the borders of most of those richer nations. Why not partner with…

>Why not partner with MasterCard or VISA? Because the problem domain is different for credit card transactions compared to covid stimulus?

The problem domain is identity verification, by and large. Something that we have many, many very large multinational corporations solving on a transactional basis that absolutely dwarfs stimulus' programs needs.

Yet, somehow, the stimulus programs still require exorbitant amounts of their budget to verify known persons, and use this as a way to deny access to those who are most vulnerable.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#97

Post by pdonis »

jjoonathan wrote: post #90
pdonis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything is sacrificing the well-being of poor Americans who deserve better, it is the fact that helping them is punted to government bureaucracies instead of being done by private individuals and charitable organizations who are both able and motivated to exercise much better judgment about who needs help and what help is needed than any government bureaucrat can possibly do.

Quite the opposite. Our instincts surrounding charity are to help when it won't directly hurt us -- but if everything is commoditized, all charity directly hurts us. A dollar we give to the poor today is a dollar we can't use to shelter our family on a future rainy day. Directly incentivizing against individual action and then insisting on individual action as the only path forward is a guaranteed recipe for continue…

> A dollar we give to the poor today is a dollar we can't use to shelter our family on a future rainy day

So is a dollar you pay in taxes, ostensibly to help the poor but in reality it won't (see my post elsewhere in this thread on government bureaucracies). At least if you spend the dollar directly on a poor person, you know it's going directly to that poor person.

> Directly incentivizing against individual action

The only thing doing that is the government--by taking away our money in taxes, whether we agree with how it's spent or not, the government is preventing us from spending it on things we believe are justified, such as charity.

> continued failure -- which is exactly what we observe

We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor, by paying taxes, but most of that money doesn't actually help the poor. If people understood that either they have to help the poor directly or the poor won't get helped, you'd see many more people actually helping instead of punting it to the government in the mistaken belief that the government will take care of it.

> This is a collective problem

This is the excuse every collectivist uses to commandeer other people's resources and then squander them. Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself of helping the poor, so you'll outsource it to government bureaucrats. Who are even less motivated to actually help people than you are.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#98

Post by shakna »

hellojesus wrote: post #73
reidjs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important because it sounds incorrect, but in reality it works out like that. In my experience most people think that if you give a poor person money they are just going to spend it on things which make their life worse, like drugs. It's one way to justify not giving a few quarters or a dollar to a homeless person on the street when they ask.

Yes, but another way to justify it is that it's your money, and the utility you get from spending it on that random, asking person is less than you would get from the next best expenditure (opportunity cost). That's not to say I don't give charitably or believe in it. I just don't think that anyone has to justify not giving money to some random when asked. I don't believe it's the government's job to hand out money t…

> I don't believe it's the government's job to hand out money to people in need. I think private charities and churches do a lot better job of spending it than a bureaucratic government, and the auditability of where the money goes is way, way more transparent so long as you're not dealing with a shady organization (which you can easily vet).

There are many "popular" charities for which auditing is as far from transparent as can be, where the majority of their spending never reaches the target audience. To the point where this is the _norm_.

Government programs, on the other hand, are required to account for every dollar spent, and issue regular public reports.

How would one go about vetting the Salvation Army's spending, for example? They say they have regular independent audits, for none of those are public. So when they say 82% of donations go to the intended target, you must simply trust them.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#99

Post by RHSeeger »

amelius wrote: post #60
shakna wrote: post #12

> In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People such as Bamaze, with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. 10 days from incepti…

> That kind of speed of development is absolutely possible And every time I say on HN that I can do something in a weekend, I get downvoted.

And every time you say it, you're almost certainly wrong if it's about anything but a proof of concept. Every single "I can do that in a weekend" post I've ever seen basically ignores all the complexity of software development and would result in a completely useless system except for, at best, the optimal happy path.

Re: Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks

#100

Post by hellojesus »

johnday wrote: post #65
complianceowl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake you make is assuming that your supposed 'noble intentions' justify what you are proposing; they do not. Your noble intentions are absolutely hypocritical and fake. If you really cared about the poor, you would voluntarily donate money from your own pocket; you don't need a law for that. Instead, you want to use the legislator to compel the others to the involuntary distribution of their hard-earned money.…

> If you really cared about the poor, you would voluntarily donate money from your own pocket; you don't need a law for that. Instead, you want to use the legislator to compel the others to the involuntary distribution of their hard-earned money. Why "instead"? Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?

Our nation is founded on liberty.

> Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?

You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.

The poster suggested that you take on the personal responsibility for righting what you perceive as an injustice in the world. I agree with them.

Anything else would be tyranny, as others have pointed out.

Post reply on HN