Read Kathy on means-testing, and the efficiency and equity problems that occur when you start confining benefits to small groups of people and creating agencies to test eligibility. Means testing tends, confusingly, to be a neoliberal obsession. Its confusing because the neolibs were the group most concerned with the smooth and efficient functioning of government, yet they never really engaged the historic problems that bedevil programs that only serve the poor. As the saying goes, programs for the poor are poor programs, and for completely predictable reasons. If you're worried about government functioning well, and also an advocate of creating a lot more programs that only serve politically marginalized constituencies, you better have an explanation for how the one doesn't invalidate the other. Which is not to say there's no truth to the insight that the poor should pay less for things, and the rich more. There need not be a sharp tension between means testing and universalism. You can means test universal programs -- which is how most of the current health reform proposals work. The poor are subsidized into the system, the rich buy themselves in. But, crucially, everyone is in the same system. When you split social services into many tiers, however, you lose much in efficiency, much in equity, and you almost certainly condemn the poor to substandard services. If anyone should understand that, it's the neoliberals.
