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Sheep: Republicans sure love their work requirements and means testing. Goat: Who do they think is going to adminster these new rules since they've fired everyone? Sheep: It would be a terrible thing if someone got something they didn't deserve, assuming that someone isn't a defense contractor. Goat: Work requirements make more busywork for everyone. I thought the G.O.P. was against red tape! Sheep: Come to think of it, elected officials are also exempt from this. Goat: Maybe we should enact work requirements for Congress.

NEW COMIC TWO OR THREE TIMES A WEEK, OR WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

I don't know why it never occurs to Republicans that adding work requirements and means testing to what I'm going to refer to with the umbrella term of "welfare" is more expensive than just letting anyone who asks for it have it; and further that the administration of these bullshit requirements is basically welfare for bureaucrats. Remember bureaucrats, Republicans? The ones you've been trying to make extinct?

There's also the obvious argument from hypocrisy: Republicans are only against hand-outs to the poor. Oil companies, Big Ag, Big Pharma, they all get hand-outs called subsidies. It's also worth noting that once the government starts subsidizing an industry, that industry gets bought up and consolidated in order for the oligarchs to drain the government coffers more efficiently. Poor people simply cannot compete.

I worked for a not-for-profit which administered "welfare" and the sheer scale and intrusiveness of the required paperwork is unimaginable to anyone from the middle class or above; if someone on the bus started asking you these questions, you'd punch him in his fat face. And this was to give out an unbelievably small amount of money -- not even cash, just a benefit paid to someone else on the applicant's behalf. The number of people whose job it was to push these required pieces of paper around -- or sometimes bits in computers which are literally older than I am -- is astounding.

Go work for one of those kinds of companies, see if you don't come out of it thinking Universal Basic Income is a good idea, if not Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.