Targeting Costs

Targeting requires a classification system: rules define deservingness, officials or institutions interpret those rules, and applicants must prove that they qualify. Each layer costs money and creates another point where discretion, error, or corruption can redirect support. Tightening eligibility may block some incorrect claims, but it can also exclude deserving people who cannot navigate the gatekeeping process. The relevant comparison is therefore not targeted spending versus waste; it is the targeting system’s total administrative and exclusion costs versus the leakage it prevents.

This is not an argument that every benefit must go to everyone. Targeting remains defensible when qualification can be established cheaply and reliably, and when the resources saved by excluding ineligible recipients exceed the costs and errors created by screening.