Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…… which would actually naturally lead to cutting a lot of the bureaucracy of government. I think the other thing he would probably be arguing for is, again, going back to the design of the minimum income or the negative income tax, that there’s a way he… Ultimately, he decided to run it through the tax system. The government’s already collecting this data, they already have your information, and they can just send the money out through the system rather than having a social bureaucracy where you have to come in person, you have to fill out forms, you have to document. Do you own a car? What’s your income? Who lives in the household? And his analysis of that, who that really benefited, was the bureaucracy that processed that paper, that implemented those norms, and that if you could pull that away, you could get help out where it was needed much quicker without having this drag of people doing unproductive work of administering these systems, so trying to cut administrative overhead. And what he didn’t have then, which we have now, is the technology that we have and the ability to send benefits out via smartphone or just to move so much faster and to handle information on a mass scale so much faster. It’s painful but I think one of the big things you can do is just that, which is digitalize. I don’t know if that’s a word, but just convert everything into where the speed of signal can be instantaneous. So there’s no paperwork. It goes immediately, and then that means that the pricing signals and all these things are just immediately available to people.…

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