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Most of what DOGE "found" remains totally unsubstantiated and quite a bit of it turned out to be them misunderstanding what they were looking at.
I still don't understand why you think this is harder than verifying both identity and that specific conditions have been met. With those systems, you could cheat on either dimension, identity/qualification, whereas UBI has no qualification dimension to cheat on.
Because I'm approaching it from security of the participants in the system, not protecting the system against cheating. Removing dimensions from the system perspective sounds great, but from the security perspective puts all eggs in one basket.
If right now my existence stops depending on my actions and only my identity, I am in one go massively more vulnerable. I must protect the integrity of my identity at all costs then, which is already impossible because my identity is a number that many a government, hospital, bank and bitcoin exchange has already leaked and lost for me.
Ok, I can appreciate that. I still don't see why you'd expect it to be worse than the current situation with Social Security.
If you're thinking about magnitude as making it different, without spending a ton more on transfer programs it would be hard to much higher than about $8k per person.
Because you actually need to deliver proof of work for unemployment benefits. That extra factor makes it unattractive as a way to leech, and is also illustrating why cashing in pensions of deceased people is much more attractive - regardless of what DOGE did or did not find - and is, I believe, a much more common crime. I'll try to find some numbers on that.
The impact of fraud becomes much bigger too: right now, if someone steals my identity, claims they are me and gets a social security check in my name, they cheat the system of something I wouldn't be getting, so I lose nothing. When you do this with UBI though, it takes away my lifeline.
Maybe I'm wrong and overfocused on the downside of it all, it's just that ever since all these techbros started pitching UBI, have not been able to think of a scenario where the whole can be secure without total privacy invasion.
Because you actually need to deliver proof of work for unemployment benefits.
But I was asking about Social Security, which is not an unemployment benefit. You just get it for being old enough, provided you worked when you were young. If you stole an old person's identity, it should be just as easy to capture their stream of benefits as it would be to capture someone's UBI.
I also don't see why it requires any more of a privacy invasion than current benefits. Again, all you'd have to show is identity, as opposed to identity plus other personal information, which is required for current conditional benefits.
Didn't DOGE find all those old people that didn't exist?
I'd have to ask people that are in the handing out tax payer money business on the unemployment side to be sure, but the way I understand it most of the current "handout" programs in the US are, like the ones in the EU, conditional to some actions being taken by the receiver, like evidence of actively chasing jobs or re-schooling. If you don't do it then the flow doesn't come your way anymore. You can actively do that for a subset of the population, but probably not for the whole?
So you'll solve it with things like: scan your eyeball for money - which coincidentally happens to be Sam Altman's sc(he/a)me for future UBI. I remember this kid from my childhood that was always beating up other kids to steal their smokes. He'd have a nice collection of eyeballs, I'm sure.