In my cab driving days I hauled around a bunch of people to/from medical appointments and they talk on the phone a lot...

Some people are absolute experts at navigating the bureaucracy to the point I expect they know the rules better than the people that work at the various government agencies. It was quite impressive to be honest.

One example off the top of my head; this lady was talking on the phone with a friend (or whoever) explaining how their benefits would be impacted if they declared the father of the children resided in the household and how it was much better to just lie and claim to be a single mother.

No judgement from me as it was quite the education on governmental programs.

As an added bonus I also learned a bunch of methods on how to steal groceries from walmart since people are surprisingly candid on these things when they're just having a conversation with some random cab driver they probably won't ever see again.

If you've got the mental bandwidth and dedication to learn these kinds of things, it can be very impressive. This is obviously a much less dramatic example, but when my wife worked for a costume wholesaler over a decade ago, she had to learn how customs regulations worked in order to design costumes that would be able to be imported without the higher duty associated with "wearable garments", and by the time she left that job, she knew the regulations better than at least some of the customs agents she had to interact with.

I have great respect for people who can learn to navigate government bureaucracies well enough to avoid getting caught up on all the deliberate snares and thorns—all the moreso if they can do so while also being poor, working 3 jobs, raising kids as a single parent, etc.

> I have great respect for people who can learn to navigate government bureaucracies well enough to avoid getting caught up on all the deliberate snares and thorns—all the moreso if they can do so while also being poor, working 3 jobs, raising kids as a single parent, etc.

Yes, the latter is a very peculiar combination, because not many people with the mental skills required to navigate a bureaucracy like that stay poor (because some employers are willing to pay a lot for those skills).

Or to flip the statement: in order to fully benefit from the programs designed to help poor people, you need skills that few poor people have.

(Of course, this is all about averages and aggregates. There are certainly people who manage to be both poor and have the skills and mentality required to navigate the bureaucracy.)

My 'flipped' statement is one of the best arguments for a UBI-style simplification of means testing that I know of.

> Yes, the latter is a very peculiar combination, because not many people with the mental skills required to navigate a bureaucracy like that stay poor (because some employers are willing to pay a lot for those skills).

Whooo boy that's a lot of assumptions there.

Sorry, but it just doesn't hold up in practice. If you're working at McDonald's, your employer has very little interest in your ability to navigate a complex bureaucracy. Especially when the manager is the manager because he's the franchise owner's nephew.

Unfortunately, in most low-level jobs, that kind of skill—and, more importantly, the initiative required to obtain the skill—is not only not valued, it is punished.

I've seen a number of people I know who are very bright, very talented people stuck in low-end jobs for exactly those reasons. (Plus the good old standbys of "can't take time off to do job interviews, too exhausted each night to spend hours sending out applications", etc.)

So, are you going to go for that 14th job interview, or are you going to go spend four hours making sure you have childcare next month? Do you finish the online test, or do you fill out the form on the benefits website for the fifth time this month?