[shadowfiend]

Just to make sure I understand—you're saying that because your family, which is 4x the poverty level income, got this discount, and did not need it, you believe that this program did not help people under the poverty line?

Or is it that because your family, which is 4x the poverty level income, got this discount, and did not need it, you believe this program was not meant to help people under the poverty line?

Which is to say, can you make your point more precisely?

[silent_cal]

The second one - it's not meant to help the poor only. They just use that language to make it more popular. It should be more difficult to qualify for this program, such that people well over the poverty level like me would not receive it.

[yowzadave]

> They just use that language to make it more popular.

I agree that sometimes issues are framed that way to get sympathy for a program’s beneficiaries, but I think it’s probably a bad tactic (from a marketing perspective) and an even worse move (from a policy design perspective) when programs are specifically designed to benefit the poor only.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don’t like to think of themselves as “moochers”, or as in need; they have a reflexive negative attitude toward “welfare recipients”. Better to just make the programs universal, and to advertise them as universal; when everybody benefits, so do the poor, but it’s no longer a wedge issue, it’s just something we’re proud of that our society does. People who go to public school are just normal people. Yes, public school happens to benefit the poor. The fact that rich people can also send their kids to public school is not a problem, though, and it would hurt public school to frame it as something for the poor.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

What's the rate of error you're willing to tolerate in such a system, and what does it cost to achieve that rate?

There is a breakpoint in those numbers where it becomes cheaper to allow some error.