‘Fiscal redistribution’ requires uniform distribution, without any form of means testing---[x] is welfare services.

Our social machinery has become so large and complicated that its essential features may be obscured and ignored. The division already noted between commitments in the round amounts of $700 million under federal jurisdiction and $400 million under provincial and local jurisdiction coincides with inherent and profound differences between measures of fiscal redistribution and measures of welfare service. Fiscal redistribution is characterized by uniform benefits, indifference to individual circumstances, absence of means testing, low administrative cost per unit of expenditure, high budgetary cost, inflexibility, and simplicity. Welfare services generally have the opposite characteristics. It is not an unfair comparison to say that achievement in the former is typically reckoned in terms of payments distributed and in the latter in terms of personal situations relieved. The benefits of fiscal redistribution are therefore apt to be represented and understood in terms of simple and impressive magnitudes that command public enthusiasm, while the performance of a welfare service is known as a rule only to people who have a professional interest in it and to the beneficiaries themselves. Associated with these differences there is the possibility of different financing procedures. No government has any obligation in principle to administer social welfare in uniform financial doses alike to those who need them and those who don't; such arrangements are a matter of political choice and social convenience to which contributory conditions can therefore be attached. But necessary welfare services, according to standards of necessity that touch the public conscience, are an obligation of the community that is properly chargeable to general revenue as the responsibility of all taxpayers.

I think these distinctions are warranted and fairly stated. But if this suggested antithesis conveys an impression of bias I must acknowledge that I am concerned here to emphasize characteristic features as regards the alternative methods that profoundly affect the results obtainable and the costs incurred. In particular, I have reached the conviction that investigation procedures – “means testing" is the common and unpopular word – deserve more realistic and enterprising recognition in politics as a condition of adequate and re-sponsible treatment of human distress by public authorities, because they can be made to fit the personal terms of the problem and therefore serve to protect the beneficiaries as well as the revenue, whereas uniform cash allowances at any practicable level cannot by their very nature cover the needs of the most unfortunate.