# 25. Political / organisational tricks ## 25.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species ## 25.5.22. System overload This strategy seeks to deliberately overload the budgets of various state-controlled departments in order to precipitate a crisis and force a change in policy. Social welfare or universal medical insurance are the oft-mentioned examples where this has been mooted as a possible strategy. Although the strategy has never knowingly been successfully implemented in full, it is used to deliberately pressurise government budgets for political reasons. It was originally an idea of a pair of US sociologists and political activists (Cloward and Fox) in 1966, who suggested that the social welfare system needed to be deliberately overloaded in order to force the US government to implement a fairer system of guaranteed annual income. The idea was that this would bring a final end to poverty, a goal which the social welfare system could never achieve.