Policy punishes disabled people who save more than $2k
fullstackeconomics.com
fullstackeconomics.com
"Assistance" programs meant to prop people up with so many reporting requirements and perverse incentives that punish you for improving your situation to the extent that the best path is to not even try to improve your situation and be entirely dependent on the program because when you do start earning income or saving anything, they take so much away from you that there is a significant cost to any amount of improvement until well after you'd be self-sufficient. i.e. it is more expensive to earn any income than it is to earn none, and the constant threat of losing support of the program (explicit threats) is much more anxiety inducing for the most vulnerable populations often than the situation they were trying to exit.
Being homeless, getting into a program to help the homeless, and then constantly being threatened with a return to homelessness if somebody doesn't do the paperwork exactly right is just crazy, but I've seen it first hand.
At least here in Europe. Speaking from experience.
We have several people directly profiting from several ineffective policies targeting disadvantaged in the local Parliament.
I've seen clerks actively discourage people from asking for the benefits even before the official evaluation.
This pov is exactly what I was describing. It's always "more money will fix it." More control, more money, and then things will be better. I promise. Compulsive gamblers have a term for this: "chasing losses"
>How would you solve this without the government?
The problem of people with disabilities needing help? Do you believe people never received help before the government came along? They were helped at a local level by charitable people who cared about each other and knew that taking care of each other was part of a healthy society. Neither business nor government replaces that.
I do. Especially when people who need the help are from poor communities who can’t spare much - much less provide things like in home care, transportation, etc.
If you say gov doesn’t need to be involved then please show me who is gonna help. The only ones I know of are the same that throw queer kids or male domestic abuse victims out on the street. People are more charitable when they’re rich (or more accurately, on rising incomes), but they only help out people close to them. Poor people are dehumanized. That’s why we need the gov.
Or did you not like see the lines of cars 20 miles long during covid for food assistance?
There are plenty of stories about religious programs refusing to help those outside of their religion which presents a pretty big problem if we're supposed to rely on them for universal charity.
One recent story: https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-i...
I can see from your very uncharitable reading of my comment how you could see that I was saying that. I was saying that many people have not and currently don't have receive help from those charitable institutions, and also its not enough.
Look around you to see whether charitable programs are enough to solve these problems. If they were, they'd be solved. They are /helping/, but they're not enough, and often they come with strings attached like hide that you're LGBT, which some people literally can't do.
People need actual security - if charitable programs gave it to people then there'd be no problem, but they can't or won't.
There's plenty of easy answers to these problems if we'd look to just emulate what other countries do for welfare, healthcare etc instead of pretending that we're better than them while failing at every aspect.
Depends on the time period, and honest we simply didn't have modern medicine either. Your disabled child might have been left on the streets, left in the woods to die, or sold to someone else (other children might have been sold too). An infant? Infanticide was a thing at different times. Sometimes you'd be sent away to a home, where you'd be abused.
You were often an outcast and a beggar and your life was a lot worse. And even worse, folks might have treated you like you deserved it because it was a sign of god's wrath.
In short, folks with disabilities have it better than they did in the past because we started banding together as a society and taking care of folks (government). And we still fail folks.
Yes. These people simply died. Charity helps a few of them but is woefully incapable of helping all of them.
> They were helped at a local level by charitable people who cared about each other and knew that taking care of each other was part of a healthy society.
My aunt has a brain injury. She needs trained help as well as expensive doctors. Charity has done fuck all to help her - except the countless hours my parents have spent helping her. Where are these magical charities she can go to?
Wouldn't you be happy if more people were like your parents? If there were "expensive doctors" who felt in their hearts the need to help your aunt, free of charge? It's not an imaginary world, it just takes work to build. But the further we replace the spirit of charity with an impersonal, dysfunctional system of coercion, the harder it is to realize that world.
What’s even better is, this system already exists and is being utilized beyond its breaking point.
How do I know? Well, it takes 1 to 2 YEARS to be approved for SSI or SSDI and, if you can’t work, someone has to pay for your basic cost of living. Or you become homeless.
Anyone who is applying for SSDI and isn’t homeless is being supported by someone.
In all seriousness, I appreciate it. No snark, I don’t care if we don’t see eye-to-eye from a policy perspective, I appreciate what you’re doing.
Disability is a really hard experience. I can’t describe what it’s like to lose these things we take for granted. Being without pain. Making choices for yourself. Going to a movie.
By giving a disabled person a home, you’re giving some of that back to them. If you’ve never done this before, you might be surprised by how hard it is, the rewards for the disabled person aren’t necessarily always visible, but what you’re doing is important.
My parents wanted to retire another state. My aunt needed to come with them because they handle a large amount of her care. She was unable to apply for medicaid in the new state until dropping medicaid in the old state but there was no guarantee that she'd get medicaid in the new state. So moving was incredibly perilous.
Hard to do when malpractice lawsuits are a thing.
This is a pretty dishonest strawman on many levels. First, taxation-based disability support is "spirit of charity" at scale.
Second, local charity is not mutually exclusive with disability support and talking about "replace" makes a strawman.
Third, local charity is in no way guaranteed. Something happens and suddenly charities run out of funds and disabled people can die of hunger.
I invite you to not pay your taxes and watch what happens.
As a society? Societies are perfectly free to decide to stop taxation.
Even if you could make that argument that coerced individual decisions could result in non-coerced societal decisions, you need to consider the entire implication: society is being "charitable" to itself, which isn't charity, it's selfishness. Charity is giving to others. So your point is nonsensical on multiple levels.
I would, yes. But just hoping that the world is filled with people who are willing and capable of helping in this manner is not productive. Almost nobody has the time and resources and will to help in the ways that my parents have.
> If there were "expensive doctors" who felt in their hearts the need to help your aunt, free of charge?
That'd be nice too. I do not expect this to be a thing I can rely on.
In the Middle Ages, monasteries often had healing clinics and hospitals, though the hospitals were for the dying, usually. And sometimes food for people in want.
Of course, in the Middle Ages, the Church was really part of the government, parallel to the kings, dukes, etc etc.
Now medical care has gotten so expensive that it's beyond the capacity of any charity except for isolated cases. Similarly for housing. Food there's some support for.
Prior to such programs, level of help was far more variable and often dependent mostly on family.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-con...
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/...
You can leave off "it never existed" if you immediately acknowledge that it did exist, but with constraints.
If the constraints/scaling are what you care about, then make the case that everyone is better off with an inefficient system of coercion and perverse incentives, versus a system where people are giving their time and money willingly out of the goodness inside them.
Can you please point me to these charities that help the disabled afford to live that I keep hearing so much about?
The process of applying for SSDI is horrible and demeaning and I’d really love to go with one of those organizations instead!
They get disgusting looks & “we’ll pray for your soul” (saying it as if they believe it’s already been damned to hell)
Over 12 years of dealing with things myself & making friends along the way in person & online.
Spending countless nights trolling through comments in countless amounts of old threads of very vulnerable people trying to get away from things like domestic violence while also facing severely disabling medical issues (often but not limited to younger people with abusive parents somewhat controlling their lives via their disability) & reaching out to/begging quite literally wherever they’re able & overwhelmingly being turned away.
Of course, you can always say that they/I are LARPing & there’s not much I can do about that unfortunately.
If you’d like a bright side/silver lining to any of this - places that attract minorities/marginalized groups are often the most helpful (geeze, wonder why) & if shit ever truly hits the fan in your life, make your way to your nearest Sikh Gurudwara.
As long as you show the most basic humility & respect the few things they ask you to observe in their place of worship, they will go so far out of their way to try to help you in every way they can. Unfortunately, malicious people tend to take advantage of this in bigger cities & some are starting to get slightly jaded. I cannot blame them, such is life.
I’m not trying to say all religions orgs & charities are shit across the board. Perhaps it seemed that way. I’m just saying that they’re very much not as much of an answer that some of society seems to think they may be, & there are some truly awful people among them that will kick you harder when you’re already at your lowest point. (As with everywhere/everything)
"more control" ?
"Expanding welfare programs = more control" is some tinfoil hat thinking.
I want you to pause for a moment and think critically for a moment and consider the context of the conversation.
Right now, if you're disabled, you're given a paltry $841/month, and you're told that if you ever have more than $2,000 in cash, that $841 will be taken away. The government is forcing you to live in poverty. You can't save money. Imagine you found a way to start a business despite your disabilities, and single $2000 month of income takes all your benefits away. Any attempt at improving your situation becomes an all-in endevour, so you better not fuck it up, or else the government kicks you into homelessness after the $841/month gets taken away.
How is improving this program by lifting the $2K limit expanding control? Seems like it would reduce control if you ask me by giving you the freedom to make the attempt at improving your life without worry of failure.
It takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to call that a tinfoil hat theory when we're literally in a comment section discussion all the stupid things people on .gov aid have to do/avoid in order to ensure continued income. If that's not control what is?
I'm literally arguing in favor of increasing the asset limit so people don't have to jump through hoops to avoid losing their benefits. I'm arguing against those controls. How are you twisting this around?
1. Drag their feet until Democrats reluctantly agree to include something guaranteed to cause dysfunction (uneconomic means testing, perverse incentive cliffs, adverse selection, etc).
2. Point at the dysfunction they created as a reason to kill the program.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to #2 if I didn't see so much #1.
Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.
They tried to do so in January but Manchin and Sinema voted against it.
In fact they've already done so at least once:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/585192-senate-passes-bil...
But according to TFA, this $2000 policy limit has been in place since 1989. What have the Democrats done? Have they not been in any position of power in the last 30 years?
Probably they have just also sat around and blamed the other party too. Sick of this passing the buck bullshit that literally gets nothing done.
This isn't to let the Democrats off the hook, only to explain that Democratic voters are not uniformly behind improving these policies.
The democrats in office simply do not represent their constituents. The democrat-voting population is farther left than the democrat politicians. However, outside of the more radical democrats like Sanders and AOC, most democrats have been bought by the wealthy just like the republicans.
That is your opinion, and based on your experience in your cohort, and additionally does not really address what "more left" actually means. There are many different types of people that vote Democrat at many different stages of life, in many different industries and in different states/areas where certain things have more support than others. And that's before we even start breaking things out to being "left" socially or fiscally.
I don't think the answer is "quite simple" at all, at least not in the way you explained it.
I notice we have not had Bernie Sanders on the Presidential ticket, despite two runs; and there is surely some reason for that.
Possibly the voters have identified that those candidates will not gain sufficient independent or Republican support to actual win in general elections.
In any case, it seems likely to be a lot more nuanced than you're suggesting.
Assuming that the primaries represent who will actually win a presidential election is as much of a mistake as assuming that polls are accurate when it comes to election day.
On the other hand, the far right thinks anyone left of Trump is a socialist and will vote Republican just to try to keep away socialism.
Couldn't it also just be that there's a lot to keep track of for our current government (of laws and making/updating/enforcing them)? As society grows, you inevitably will have issues that fall through the cracks if administration doesn't also grow accordingly. Maybe they haven't gotten to updating this $2,000 thing because they're focused on other more important things? Hell, I doubt there's a single politician, that knows at the top of their head, all the laws and policies we as a government have in effect, along with all their nuances...
And then the other problem is that the majority has to come to agreement for things to actually change. This is often a slow process. Sometimes you have politicians trying to change stuff like this, but they alone don't quite have enough power, and it takes time for them to convince others that it needs addressing, let alone the proper way to address it.
* The 1993 - 1994 congressional term[1], during which they tried and failed to do healthcare reform, but succeeded in passing bills for medical leave, NAFTA, gun control, violent crime, taxes, and education.
* June 30, 2009 - February 4, 2010 (72 working days total)[2], during which they passed a major healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Care Act.
From 1981 - 1992, 1995 - 2008, and 2011 - 2020, Republicans have held the presidency or at least one house of Congress. During 2009-2010 and 2021-present, they have also abused the Senate filibuster to obstruct almost the entire Democratic agenda, with the goal of making the public perceive Democrats as ineffective. (As you have seen for yourself, it worked!) In the current term, the Democrats have a bare 50%+1 majority, which means that the most conservative Democrat (usually Joe Manchin of West Virginia) effectively has a veto.
On top of that, the Supreme Court has been controlled by Republican partisans since 2006, when Samuel Alito was appointed. Currently there is a 5-vote majority of extreme Republican partisans. This creates an additional Republican veto point for effectively any Democratic legislation.
One can (and should) criticize the Democrats for not ending the filibuster when they had the chance. But the reality is that the American legislative process involves a lot of veto points, and it only takes control of one to kill a bill.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/103rd_United_States_Congress#M...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress
NAFTA doesn't really count here since it was passed over strong (but not unanimous) Democratic resistance with almost unanimous Republican support.
Or maybe it does, since while it was a break from the existing and prior policy orientation of the party, it was a Clinton policy which presaged the emergent dominance of the anti-worker neoliberal capitalist wing of the party that dominated the party from after it's defeat in the 1994 midterms until now (weakening a bit in the last several years.)
While there is that, welfare traps are not limited to the US, and through countries with very different levels of “social democratic” focus, so they are clearly a broader and more compelling thing somehow.
It's like if we shut down Home Depot because there's people stealing merchandise.
Welp, buncha fuckin freeloaders stealing tools again! Better get rid of all the Home Depots so nobody can steal.
They just need to fix the qualifications at the margin, but that is often met with hostility from other voters for the misguided reason that people are just leeching off these programs, when the reality is exactly what is described, that the paperwork and punishment for extra earning is exactly what makes that happen, to the extents that it does.
For the record I absolutely don’t want the government handling everything, I’m just tired of hearing that everything the government does is disfunctional and everything private enterprise does is great and noble, cause it’s not true.
Just a hint, the people causing this dysfunctional state of affairs are probably not the ones who are trying to expand government benefits to cover as many people as possible.
See for example, drug testing of assistance recipients. It turns out, as the testing has proven, that most of the people who get a little bit of cash are most likely to use it on food and essentials. Oh, and the people who run the for-profit drug testing happen to be cronies of the politicians who advocated for the testing - such a surprise.
Another example: Don't let people withdraw all their money at once or they will waste it. Instead give them debit cards with a small withdrawal limit. Oh, and there's a withdrawal fee that eats into the meager cash ... and cronies of the politicians who advocated for the policy own the ATMs in the stores which collect those fees.
She'd be dead in the ground if conservative policies ran everything.
It is not surprising that the government functions like the people that elected it. If your community is comprised of assholes, you get cruel policies.
Welfare traps are definitely a thing in countries and cultures with “safety nets that works”, fwiw.
Sadly, most people have to advocate for themselves. They have to research what they need to do to get benefits, try to figure out how to navigate the poorly designed system, make calls, fill out paperwork, submit documents, etc. Poor people may not have the mental/emotional energy to go through all this.
I know, I know. Sometimes this is the system behaving as designed. The government makes it hard for people to get benefits so it doesn't have to pay as much. Such design is despicable.
The first and last step is to just give them cash. Give everyone cash indiscriminately. If we want to help people.
To ensure the the wealth is not being transferred from poor to wealthy, you have marginal income/wealth or marginal sales tax rates.
You can give people cash. You also have to kill a lot of restrictive zoning laws, because new housing can't be built until they go away. You need to require new housing to pay for new infrastructure to support itself, and then you need to require old housing to pay for maintaining their infrastructure, too. You need to kill off local funding of education in favor of universal funding of education, because otherwise the poor kids get substandard schools and teachers.
You need to fund public transit, and it needs to be aimed at getting people not just from their homes to work and back, but also to schools and stores and entertainment.
Everything has to be automatically indexed to inflation, or else you get the same problem ten to twenty years later.
It’s just straight-up more expensive to be disabled than non-disabled.
This was a big discussion in the disabilities community around Yang’s UBI in 2020.
I find UBI intriguing, but it wouldn’t necessarily free us from complexities like this.
I’m certain it would be less onerous than what we deal with now. It’s hard to describe the disability process as anything but “onerous”.
As long as those with needs greater than the average population are accounted for, I (cautiously) favor this idea. One of the hardest things about being disabled is that suddenly many people feel entitled to make choices for you. I sorely miss having the control and choice in my life that I had when I was able to work.
And a situation like that definitely won't stop you from saving money. It doesn't trap you. If a wage increase takes your payment from significantly below market rent up to market rent, you'll be able to save up a security deposit and moving expenses pretty quickly.
Lower the percentage some or make it a third of net income and it sounds like a pretty great system.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/you-c...
It's much more complicated than calling people "fools" for paying.
TBH the program is a disaster and it's really, really disappointing that the loans won't just simply be forgiven. I personally know many people held back from economic participation because of federal student loans. Even if you want to be all bs moralistic about the responsibility of paying debts back, from an economic perspective the loans should be forgiven.
> all bs moralistic about the responsibility of paying debts back
It's dishonorable to not pay back money you borrowed. I'm sure if you loaned someone money, and they said "bs" when you expected repayment, you'd be very put out.
P.S. I've had people who've stolen money from me contact me years later wanting to do business together. I don't understand modern morality, or how they'd imagine I'd ever work with them again.
Neither?
The fact that the promise was made to the taxpayers doesn't make it honorable to break one's word.
It's also a major insult to every person who worked hard and paid back their loan.
This forgiveness program is a classic "moral hazard".
I've never heard of a loan contract that says that.
From a legislative standpoint, Biden is not likely to sign any more bills into law other than military & police power / budget expansion and some occasional filler.
I'm paraphrasing but basically to be eligible for Section 8 housing you can't have too many assets. Good financial planning would say to scrimp and save so that you can get make a downpayment to get a mortgage but you'll be kicked out of the section 8 housing long before you've saved enough to get out yourself.
Catch-22
The Credit Union "relies on a vendor for the software that is used to open, close, and maintain Safe Deposit Boxes. Over time, the vendor stopped consistently upgrading this software and we have now learned that it is being phased out altogether. Replacing this type of system would mean a significant cost to our membership."
A few years ago they replaced the double key system (bank employee has a key, you have a key) with a handprint system to let one customer at a time into the vault. They removed the bank key.
I always have to remember which set is where my box is: they have 3 or 4 boxes labeled 131 because they acquired them from other banks or credit unions who got out of the business.
I had to settle my aunt's estate in Huntington Beach a few years ago. The Chase branch there limited people to one box per branch because they are relatively popular. But safe deposit boxes definitely skew towards grey hair.
I opened an account with my credit union because they were one of the few options for safe deposit boxes but the branch with the boxes is miles away from my local branch so I don't use it often. I would have liked to store backups there but in the end I use BackBlaze.
Section 8 might have some inefficient cliffs. But not allowing savings for a mortgage doesn’t strike me as one of them.
I’d rather some form of UBI-like assistance. Single program, means tested but no cliffs(just a gradual phase out of some sort), and no limits on what the assistance is spent on.
A big reason why we have these perverse rules in the first place is that people are absurdly concerned with controlling people who accept (certain types of) public money.
If someone can find a path to jump from dependency to ownership, why "should" aid programs be structured to prevent that?
I, for one, would be a fan of imposing similar restrictions on other aid recipients, like mortgage-interest deduction-takers and enthanol producers. I suspect many folks would abruptly notice the absurdities with such rules.
Because the next step from subsidized housing is to renting.
If we structured subsidizing housing programs such that they enabled people to save up for down payments, this creates a perverse incentive for normal renters to get into subsidized housing to accelerate their transition to home ownership. Any time you introduce a perverse incentive like this, you overwhelm the system as people who don’t need it start crowding out people who actually do need it.
Going straight from subsidized rental housing to home ownership doesn’t make sense. Going from subsidized rentals to non-subsidized rentals is the obvious next step.
Nice bald assertion. It doesn't make sense to trap people in dependency, but I take it you're more comfortable with these programs failing in that direction...?
> this creates a perverse incentive
Which we already have, just with the reverse valence.
This is why I said I support means-testing the mortgage-interest deduction. People don't really understand things until they've been through them, and there's no good reason wealthier people shouldn't have to put up with similar paternalist nonsense for their handout.
in a perfectly efficient market, renting and home ownership costs exactly the same - not cheaper nor more expensive.
However, most home owners living in their home pay a premium for it, because they both want to secure their bid when they buy, and they are likely buying on more than just financial implications (like the location is great for their kids, etc). Therefore, a home owner is actually more likely to have a higher cost of capital over all - both the deposit and the mortgage added together, even if the mortgage interest by itself may be lower than renting.
Think of it this way - if renting was more expensive than the total cost of ownership, then an investor would borrow the capital needed for buying, and then rent it out and arbitrage the difference risk free. It is this mechanism that keeps the rent and the price of ownership at approx. equal.
In recent times, the price of ownership has grown due to the pandemic, and high availability of credit. Rent will follow, if it hasn't already, as landlords will not just eat the loss.
Which is not that far from the truth. At least on the UK, rent is an extortionary and ever-increasing tax on people who don’t have 150K to pay a deposit.
Why?
I mean that as a serious question. Housing costs in the US are absurdly front-loaded compared to renting, but they didn't used to be and there are other countries where they aren't. Why "should" housing be so expensive that six months or a year or careful saving on a living wage isn't enough for a down payment?
Advancing your career in a way that should gradually decrease your dependance on government assistance instead cuts it off all at once, turning a raise into a massive pay cut, thus ensuring you don't climb the ladder and stay dependent on aid indefinitely. It's utterly perverse.
It also has a wealth cap, but that’s unrelated to the “make a dollar more and you’re done” idea that so many people hold, which is not how SSI income phaseouts work. The wealth cap is “you accumulate more than $2k at any one time, you’re done”, and that is different from making money resulting in a sudden loss.
It probably is not a great idea to have a wealth cap at any sort of a level that might be relevant to a middle-class individual. Someone shouldn’t have to destroy their safety net in order to qualify for benefits in the event they become disabled, and disability holders should not be barred from having enough cash to operate and to access the financial tools that would allow them to build their way out of poverty.
Maybe we could set a cap at $50k wealth or something but in the end who cares, if a few people in the top 1% end up using it that’s probably less costly than administrative costs of peering at everyone’s bank statements monthly.
Nor should there really be a wealth phase-out for benefits either imo. What is the benefit of making it harder for people who are just about to make the leap off welfare to actually take the leap?
I didn’t say they shouldn’t be allowed to save at all. Only that if they are capable of saving at the level required to buy a house and service a mortgage, they likely don’t actually need assistance.
The progression would be Section 8 -> Renting -> Home Ownership
The purpose of programs like Section 8 isn't to subsidize people while they save up to purchase expensive assets and leapfrog past non-subsidized renters. It's to backstop people who couldn't afford normal rents.
Could a section 8 resident buy a house, and pay for a 1 month short term rental in the interim and meet your criteria? 6 mo? A year?
If the recipient later happens to win the lottery, I’d expect them to move directly from Section 8 housing to a mansion, no waiting period needed nor desired.
Buying a house requires signrifajt savings for a down payment, moving costs, and so on.
Subsidized housing isn’t meant to help people build up savings and accumulate possibly six figure savings to buy a house. Subsidized housing is meant to prevent people who can’t afford rent from becoming homeless.
If a subsidized housing program is structured in such a way that it’s a net financial win to be on it than to be self-sufficient (e.g. renting on your own) then it becomes a “trap” as you penalize anyone trying to escape it and you incentivize people near the threshold to stay below it.
If someone wins the lottery or gets a new job with a huge signing bonus or gets a huge inheritance then by all means go buy a house right away and skip the renting step.
However, we need to revoke their place in the subsidized housing program as soon as they can afford to be off of it. I think people in this thread are forgetting that subsidized housing is a very limited resource and therefore we need to focus it on the people who need it most. Leaving people in the program who are accumulating six-figure house down payments from the savings would suggest that they don’t actually need the program but are taking the place of someone else who does need the help.
I think it’s more that the supply of subsidized housing is so low that it’s literally only people in the worst kinds of situations that qualify.
Obviously someone saving for a 100k down payment doesn’t need it, but there’s a whole sea of people in between that have no options now. Rent is too expensive, and subsidized housing is unavailable (only goes to the people that need it most). Ergo, I’m stuck in my parents’ house until I die, unless I want to pay extortionate rent for a shitty apartment.
Meanwhile, the people that do get subsidized housing suddenly have both a nice house and a lot of ability to save. I can totally see how that breeds resentment.
I’ve heard it said that the best way to get a house would be to have kids, divorce, and then become a single mother. Which doesn’t seem to be too far from the truth.
I was an electrician’s apprentice in college and did work for countless rental properties of all levels of quality. Short terms are built in the cheapest possible area at the lowest level of quality that’s legally allowed, and often not even meeting that low standard.
On top of all of this, the cost is outrageous. A one bedroom in a short term was typically 50-100% more expensive than my 3 bedroom in a much nicer part of town.
There is no asset limitation for participation in HUD assisted-housing programs. However, the definition of annual income includes net income from family assets.
https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_35701.PDF
What you’re describing is true for many assistance programs, including snap, for example… but not section 8 as far as I understand.
You can see it in the parking lots, high end cars and high end finishes in apartments.
There is very little incentive to move out in a well ran subsidized property in NYC.
I’ve managed large developments 800+ units.
I'm currently living in a Section 8 unit that's changed ownership and is getting renovated, apartment by apartment, with residents moved to temporary units in the complex until their renovated units are ready. And the Management Company that's running things really is clueless and does not even care to even Apply for any federal programs that may be available to get proper broadband speeds to low income households.
There needs to be some Federal Requirement for Section-8 housing Management companies to be forced to apply for any Federal Programs available to them in order for the low income Residents to receive the aid set aside in these programs to help poor and low income individuals/Families get better Internet Access. And this is in a time where the Government wants every service application done online, even in the time before the pandemic. There are Jobs where folks can work from Home via online jobs/services but that requires higher speed internet capabilities than is provided/accessible to low income individuals.
This isn't the article I had in mind but it is related and interesting: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2013/9/21/two-new-y...
and includes this:
> The poor family is trapped in place. If they make the mistake of earning more observable cash, their rent will be increased by 30% of the increased earnings (that's how it works at NYCHA), and then they start taking away the other benefits as well.
It's a legitimately difficult problem, though. The interests and perspectives of the people who depend on these programs and the people who pay for them are often badly misaligned. On the one hand, you want to make it easy for the people who depend on these programs to improve their lot and achieve independence. On the other hand, the people who pay may be legitimately resentful when their money is going to strangers who don't in fact need it. It's a fine line to walk between those things, and the likely outcome is something that's biased towards one side or the other.
Neither the group that needs help (and their supporters), nor the group that doesn't want to give hands out to people who refuse to work but could, have reason to object to something like that.
The actual problem is the red meat that welfare/socialism is to our political bases in the US, and the incentives of politicians, on both sides of the aisle, to ensure it persists. If you do the obvious thing to actually address the problem, neither side can use it any longer to stir up the base. So the incentive is to not actually fix it.
The $2000 number is a cap for wealth, not income.
The problem isn’t having a phaseout or not anyway - we could set a wealth cliff of $50k and that would be perfectly fine. It’s the numbers that matter, where the phaseout or cliff is placed and how steep a phaseout. $85 a month is a redonkulous place to put the phaseout even if phaseouts are “better” - that is a worse policy than a 50k a month cliff!
And you’re right, the reasons the number hasn’t been adjusted since 1935 (in 1989 the number was inherited from a prior program, it wasn’t adjusted at that time) is because of political will. Social spending on anyone other than the elderly is extremely unpopular in the US.
I honestly don't care if $85k is the cutoff. I don't care if there is a cutoff at all (but I recognize some people don't like the idea that if a millionaire becomes disabled he'd be eligible for some amount of money from the government). If someone becomes disabled or whatever, and they have money saved from working, why would they not get benefits? Why do they have to deplete their savings first to get shitty benefits? Social security doesn't have an income or asset cutoff; why does disability?
I actually personally agree with the sister post of just...paying people based on their disability, without caring about how much other income they're able to generate, or assets they collect. But I recognize how politically untenable that is.
Suppose that between $25,000 and $35,000 income, you start paying taxes, you lose food stamps, you have to start paying toward your medical insurance, you lose your daycare assistance, free school lunches, etc., etc... each one of those could be staggered, but the net result is just overwhelming.
I'm not a big fan of social programs; but if we're going to do them, they should at least be done sensibly.
It's even simpler: stop means testing individual programs, that's what progressive taxation is for. If you are going to give someone benefits due to a particular level of disability, give them benefits calculated based on that. If they have more outside income than you would expect with that disability, good for them, and they’ll also pay more taxes. Same with other special-circumstance aid qualifications (for general poverty support, this reduced to UBI.)
Fair. But I'm resentful of the big fraudsters like Rick Scott.
I understand that this is probably a stupid question, but I'm coming from a place of ignorance: Do people who dislike/resent this not also get upset that ex. their insurance pays for things people don't "need"? Or would the kind of person who makes this complaint also not be likely to have insurance?
But to me, the emotions don't match the financials. There's always a trade-off between false positives and false negatives; the more you prevent people cheating the system, the more you deny benefits to people who need them, and vice versa. And enforcement has its own cost. But nobody feels bad about paying for too much enforcement.
Somebody needing assistance is presumed to need it, until proof is found that they are cheating the system. This will let some people use the system fraudulently, but it ensures that it catches the vulnerable that truly need it.
Someone with a projected lifespan of 20-30 more years, 2000 a month income, and no projected time frame in which they are expected to be able to earn an income who is actually successfully subsisting on that income of 2000 a month needs an input of 24000 per year to go on subsisting indefinably adjusting for inflation.
If they had $48,000 in the bank it wouldn't meaningfully effect their need. In fact making them spend down everything they have before helping them is pretty stupid it renders their life very fragile and less likely to be stable long term and doesn't even save much money. The equation begins to change only when funds on hand are sufficient to meaningfully change inflow or pay for capital investment like buying a home outright or buying a second property for income.
The turnover figure where someone doesn't NEED to have an actual income is actually reasonable measured in YEARS of income whereas the actual figure is now a single month of income.
For an alternative look at health insurance. It's possible to go from free insurance to no insurance based on a 10c an hour raise at your part time job. Most reasonable upward economic trajectories move through successively better paying positions towards healthy finances. However if you can in a single small raise go from +2% wages to -50% actual economic health moving upwards might be a quick path to homelessness before you can actually complete your upward path. This is especially true when yourself + spouse costs not 2x the cost of insuring yourself but more like 3x.
A non moronic idea might be to allow poor people to keep the same insurance that used to be free at an increasing cost such that any raise at all was ALWAYS a step up.
> the people who pay may be legitimately resentful when their money is going to strangers who don't in fact need it.
Sane solutions are not found by appealing to the emotions of ignorant, selfish, hateful people. They are found by doing math and projecting the probable results of the effect of alternative policies.
It's one thing to give someone benefits to support their person, it's another to give them benefits to support their person AND their existing savings. It's pretty natural to be less generous to someone who already has the money to pay for what they're asking you to pay for.
> Sane solutions are not found by appealing to the emotions of ignorant, selfish, hateful people.
You're not going to get "sane solutions" with that attitude. You're going to get people to feel good about ignoring your ideas because you insulted them.
Nope. This makes no sense. You're replacing their income because they can't generating any. That's it. You have no business in their rest of their life at all. Your job is to determine whether they can generate income or not and give them money if they can't, nothing else.
So, in your view, a disabled multi-millionaire should be able to collect government disability payments?
You may think this is a problem narrowly scoped to income, and that's fine. However that doesn't mean that's the only way to look at it, and that anyone who looks at it differently is doing it wrong.
> You have no business in their rest of their life at all. Your job is to determine whether they can generate income or not and give them money if they can't, nothing else.
Sorry, no. That's not how it works.
UBI would fix those perverse incentives (80% marginal "tax rate" for the next few hundred after the first 100 (per month), then an about 300~500€/month wide band with 90% marginal tax rate, followed by iirc another couple hundred at 0% marginal, and then hitting around 20% marginal (going up in piecewise-linear progression)).
But if UBI is paid out via extra taxation, then it will not induce inflation (or at least, not overall - it might induce some inflation in goods/services which wouldn't have been in demand but for the UBI, such as low cost labour). The higher taxes taken from the higher income people will reduce their demand, and thus balance out.
The process to get started was so opaque that the local 600 (camera union, I’m not even a member but they didn’t care) held a live zoom session where they screen shared with us and had us all follow their exact instructions on what boxes to check, what to fill out, etc. Folks still had trouble.
Again, it was quite the revelation.
That weekly job search/reporting requirement is not so hard for anyone working out of a union Hiring Hall as one needs to just go to their local and get the Union Rep to sign their weekly job search booklet and they have that over the phone reporting maybe but I used to go weekly to my UI office as I lived only a few blocks away from the office but that was a few decades back and not over any pandemic where the UI Offices where closed.
Show me the incentives...
One of the first pieces of advice that I received in this process — and boy is it a process! — was, “don’t ever say anything that implies that you might want to or be able to go back to work someday.”
I mean, of course I want to go back to work someday! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sick and below the poverty line, not to mention being sick is incredibly boring. I really want to be well and working and I feel like the vast majority of people in SSDI must be in the same boat.
Criteria for SSDI (paraphrasing) are that you must be disabled such that you can no longer do your job, are unable to do another job with your skills and level of ability and you’ll be in this situation for at least a year.
Even so, expressing even the desire to return to work someday beyond a year from now is apparently a sign that you can work right now to some examiners.
The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.
... or possibly "due to the layers of fraud paranoia, the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule". Difficult to know, I would think?
I know this is a subjective statement, but as I go through this process it just feels way, way, way over the top.
We could probably do with a lot less. We could probably make the process kinder. The experience is so humiliating and we do it to people who are already suffering.
Edit: Imagine, hypothetically, that the process were twice as kind but bumped the fraud rate to 1.5%. I would be totally OK with that. Maybe it’s worth spending a little extra public money to treat people with dignity.
I wish you the best of luck.
It’s like a lot of policy stuff: our congress critters have a very black-and-white approach to a problem that only comes in shades of gray.
And, thank you. I have a good support system these days and I think everything will eventually be OK. There’s just an unspecified amount of stupid stuff between here and there. :-)
According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.
The funding available will be divided equally by all eligible people.
Then fraud becomes not the taxpayers problem, but the problem of other eligible people. Those people will get more if they can reduce the fraud rate.
Obviously for this to happen, the eligible people need to be empowered to do something about it - and a good way to achieve that is to give the money to a charity for the blind to distribute to the blind, rather than directly to the government's list of blind people. Obviously you need to make sure the charity has suitable governance, but there are already regulations to ensure that.
From 2017 to 2019 they rapidly progressed from episodic to chronic. In 2019 I could no longer hold a job longer than a few weeks because my work was being interrupted too much. It was a sad year: I started the year in a VPE position but couldn’t hold a junior SE job by the end.
I am now in one of the phases of migraine (prodrome, headache, postdrome) virtually all of the time. My treatment plan is optimized at this point, there is no non-experimental intervention that is likely to improve the situation.
Extensive medical testing has provided no clue as to underlying physical phenomenon triggering these migraines. As far as physical medicine can tell, I’ve reached the “wait and hope” stage.
I am holding out hope in one area: I am in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (and the reason for that is something I will not share because it is deeply personal). Research is showing increasingly that emotional trauma can have some strange physical side-effects and I’m really hoping that processing trauma will eventually reduce my migraine frequency and intensity.
You've said you want to work so I hope you can at some point. I feel fairly confident that if you made an "Ask HN" post about your situation, someone could help you out with a very accommodating gig. Good luck
I’ve tested my ability to work four times since 2019 and three of the four have ended up being a burden on the employer (the third was a wash; it didn’t work out but I decided to write off the invoice). I’ve been on the other side of the table and I can’t do that in good conscience.
My thesis is that I should focus solely on feeling better until I can start doing some sort of sustained work; from there I can work my way up until I am able to do rewarding things with my skillset again.
The problem is that (coming back around to the article) our benefits programs have a welfare trap. These systems should be designed to help people who can reach some level of rehabilitation get there and protect the people who can’t.
The process took us about a year and required us to bring back the same forms and supporting documentation over and over and over again. Of course this all has to be done in person so I hope your disability doesn't make it difficult for you to get transportation and accommodations during business hours!
You're told by Alice at the SSA that you need Form A with supporting documents. You bring back the documents the next day and find out that Alice is not there and you have to speak to Bob. Bob tells you that you actually needed Form B so he refuses to process what you brought in. A few days later you get a scary letter saying that because you didn't get Form A processed in time, your application has been denied. So you have to meet with Alice again who tells you that Bob was wrong, and they restart your application.
Not only is this frustrating but it proved to be critical when it came to calculating back pay. If you don't know, when you are approved for SSDI you receive backpay starting from the date you first applied, minus a few weeks or months. Well because our application kept getting unfairly denied, we didn't receive any backpay for over a year of trying to get approved.
Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.
When large sums of public money are given to a company, there seems to be implication that the company is better at allocating this money than the government is. There is the idea that giving money to companies in the form of grants or contracts or even tax rebatea is 'investing in the economy'
However when pennies are given to individuals, this is immediately cause of suspicion and derision. As if individuals upskilling and bettering themselves isn't fundamental to the economy.
Is this like a weired form of self hatred?
Maybe next time I will manage it better. Is there a pass that doesn't require you to pay extra every time you want to reserve a seat/berth on the train if you already have a pass?
It really sucks that there’s a huge gap between, short-term disability and permanent disability. One you are on your for, the other the state covers 100%.
We need a comprehensive social safety net.
Contrast our funding of SSI with our funding of the defense industry, an industry that would be virtually indistinguishable from a middle class jobs program were it not for its tendency to start wars in the Middle East.
The military leaders have also been saying for years that our increase debt is an existential threat.
Again this is not criticizing the military. It’s more of a critique of the defense industry and their lobbyist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...
There's almost no evidence that there's widespread abuse of these programs... and claims to the contrary in some cases (like women having more kids to claim welfare) are talking points that are over a hundred years old.
It's still bad, but I would rather work on the assumption that this is merely incompetence rather than malice.
* SSI is run by the Social Security Administration (SSA), and it is a basic income of sorts given to some people who have little or no other income
* While SSI and its asset cap are obviously not taxes —the government is paying out money, not taking it in —there’s a similar property to many tax systems: as you make more money and become more self-sufficient, you lose some of those gains to government policy
* You really do have to play “hot potato” with your money, never saving more than three months of income (assuming you get the usual benefit) at a time, unless you can divert your money into a category that’s excluded from the SSA’s definition of resources
* So to manage life as a disabled SSI recipient, you might need to carefully separate out your different types of spending between your ABLE account and your ordinary checking account —which still can’t get above $2,000
* “It's making all disabled people into accountants, because you have to be one to follow these rules."
* That $2,000 limit is not indexed for inflation and has not been updated since 1989
A superior solution would be for Governments to setup large establishments where all of these services could be provided centrally and directly. Individuals could contribute their labor to maintain the establishment.
* There is a bi-partisan bill that has been introduced into the Senate to fix this.
* The new savings limits would be $10,000 per person / $20,000 per couple, and would be indexed to inflation.
* This is senate bill S.4102 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/410...)
* So I suppose we should call or write our senators to help push this along.
If it’s bipartisan, who are the republican co-sponsors? Doubt there are any. And a significant number of democrats will block it. Manchin and Sinema aren’t going to “expand welfare”.
Rob Portman:
https://www.portman.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/portm...
If you think it’ll pass it’s probably easy money on predictit, right?
It won’t, dead on arrival.
They're punishing hundreds of thousands of people in order to prevent the abuse of a few dozen.
Not quite. With a progressive income bracket and a simple tax scenario (1040EZ kind of thing), there is never a time where an increase in salary implies a net decrease in take-home pay. Going "into the next bracket" means your marginal dollars (the new ones you are making) get taxed at a higher rate, not your entire income.
This SSI situation does punish people, however, and it is clearly not the only assistance system with an all-or-nothing cutoff. The solution should either be to have a more intelligent system for measuring income, allowing people to put "excess" income into a focused-use bank account, or to scrap asset restrictions altogether. This sounds like the kind of requirement put in by politicians who have to pander to people who don't want to give money to "freeloaders".
Can people please stop calling means tested benefit programs “basic income“ to try to capitalize on the mindshare of an idea explicitly defined in reaction against means-tested benefit programs?
$OldFamilyMember died and left some money to $DisabledFamilyMember who would lose benefits if he took it. $DisabledFamilyMember and $OtherHeirs agreed the money would instead go to $UpperMiddleClassFamilyMember who is most responsible and least in need of money.
This would be a short path to an infuriating outcome in many families, but in this case, fortunately, the adults involved all acted like adults instead of children.
Although legally it was now $UMCFM's money, $UMCFM kept the money in a separate account and would send checks whenever $DisabledFamilyMember reported they were struggling with unexpected expenses (e.g. replacing a dead refrigerator).
Years later, the account ran out of money, but AFAIK $UMCFM never informed $DisabledFamilyMember of this fact, and $UMCFM continues to support $DFM's unexpected expenses to this day from $UMCFM's own pocket.
Some details changed to protect the privacy of all involved, and other details may not be accurate as I got some of this second- or third-hand, I was still rather young when this situation started, and it's been many years since I've heard anything about this.
I can only imagine how infuriating and demoralizing it would be if $UMCFM wasn't there to help out, $DisabledFamilyMember was on their own, and either (a) took the money and lost their benefits, or (b) didn't take the money and then had serious consequences due to lack of money (i.e. having to live without a refrigerator when it broke).
There should be some judicial principle or constitutional amendment that says a law can be thrown out if (1) it doesn't make logical sense, and/or (2) it actively defeats its stated objectives.
Anyone want to try to write a compiler that can check a legal code for consistency and automatically resolve conflicts by removing laws in a defined order until it's -- I don't quite know if this is the right terminology -- logically satisfiable by a non-empty set of models?
SSI: Supplemental Security Income
SSDI: Social Security Disability Insurance
SSI is a government subsidy, or payout, for those living in poverty. There are income and asset caps that define the poverty level.
SSDI is a "single payer" insurance program. Everyone who earns income is required to pay premiums into this program. When someone becomes permanently disabled, no longer able to earn income, they receive payouts from this insurance program.
These programs are not the same thing. And the requirements for each are not the same.
The cruel reality of healthcare expenses blurs these two things together, for the expense of suffering a medical catastrophe, and ongoing medical support, will indeed drive almost anyone into poverty.
And yes: if you become disabled, it will take you almost two years to qualify for SSDI. That's not a strict requirement of the program, but it's a consequence of how the program works. Most families, unable to earn income for that long, won't have much in the way of cash by the time their SSDI review has come through.
But it's possible to become permanently disabled while having more than $2000.
My sister received government assistance when she was under 18 because my father is disabled and retired. At the end of it she received a letter that she "surely had saved up some of it by now" and that anything she had saved would have to be returned. She would have been better off just spending it and going hog wild.
It's not a new problem. It's the result of perverse incentives in the system from top to bottom.
If we gave everyone food stamps, and we raised marginal tax rates a tiny little bit, then we would not need to spend any effort on validating who was and wasn't allowed to receive them. It would remove the stigma of having them. It would enable people to just get them without having to apply or understand paperwork.
The willingness to disguise cruelty as "just following the rules" in America is astounding.
able accounts that are listed have pretty big caveats. and are themselves confusing [like 529, you can buy them in any state, all with various fee structures]. the best course of action is to set up a special needs trust and able account and move money between them cause they each have different restrictions. but setting up a trust itself costs a couple thousand for the lawyers, which you arent allowed to save.
my sisters disabled, but luckily NJ has a program called workability that raises these limits if you have a job. otherwise its impossible to save.
This is a general problem with benefits programs and taxes that have cliffs instead of phaseouts/brackets.
> But SSI does this in an egregiously inefficient way. The loss of SSI is a fairly hefty penalty, and the loss of Medicaid is potentially much larger. Both can be triggered, all at once, by going a dollar above the $2,000 limit. This is an inefficient design , what welfare scholars call a “cliff.”
> SSI also has an income-based phaseout. Effectively, for every dollar you earn above a threshold, you lose 50 cents in benefits.
> But shockingly, that threshold is just $85 per month. So it’s like a 50 percent “tax” rate with a $85 per month standard deduction.
The problem is that congress thinks $85/mo is a good place to begin a steep phaseout of benefits. You can have a phaseout and still have the program be completely useless because of the phaseout threshold and steepness.
This isn't about phaseouts or not, it's about political unwillingness to do social spending (for anyone who’s not a senior citizen). The numbers were last adjusted in 1935, everyone knows they’re astoundingly low, but Americans don’t like social spending and actually mostly would prefer to reduce (or even eliminate) these programs.
I haven't found concrete history here, but as far as I can tell, the income limit may have made sense in 1935.
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/public-welfare/aid-for...
Though, that legislation lists $30/mo, not the $85 listed in the article. Still, that's less than $700/mo today according to this sketchy-looking inflation calculator[1], not enough for rent in many places. Another sketchy data point[2]; average rent in 1933 was $18/mo (which kinda makes sense, as housing has been skyrocketing vs CPI).
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1935?amount=30
Only in a cruel, actuarial sense.
Reagan destroyed the American social system as we know it and neoliberal consensus politicians like Clinton finished the job. But people still demand further cuts and will continue to demand further cuts no matter how deep the cuts have gotten.
Yes, we spend a lot of money on social programs, and most of it goes to costly and ineffective end-of-care for seniors (i.e. people who vote) delivered at extreme cost by an incredibly inefficient privatized healthcare system. This continues to suck the air out of the room for any social spending for the living, because of the prevailing mindset that all future social spending must be offset by reductions in other programs.
Americans have become a cruel and callous people who are unconditionally opposed to helping others or even helping their own. Nobody cares about any problem until it affects them or their direct family personally. There’s not much more to say, every single time reform is proposed it’s slapped down with “welfare queens” and “muh tax dollars”. This is what the voters want and this is what they vote for.
This reminds me that I actually had a conversation with my soon to be former boss arguing that we shouldn't have a minimum wage because of its relation to the poverty level. His thinking was that upping the minimum wage means the government has to spend more on benefits, so we shouldn't have one and let the magical free market figure it out. I asked him point blank whether these things should be tied to inflation and the cost of consumer goods, but unfortunately I can't remember what his exact response was since I was a few beers in. I do remember though that it was a weaselly cop-out of wilfull ignorance and wishful thinking.
I really wanted to pick apart how stupid that was, but it wasn't worh it. I'm still shocked that an otherwise intelligent person could think that's a sound policy, but I think that same thinking underpins terrible laws like this.
No one actually wants to look at the numbers of what things actually cost (food, housing, healthcare, etc.), wages, inflation, or how expensive it is to be poor, compared with wages and public assistance. Nope, instead we'd rather just use arbitrary numbers and emotionally abuse people by telling them it's their personal failure when the system exploits them as designed.
The current system of applying for public benefits in the US is what Kafka would've dreamed of, had he been a sadist.
His handicap is not physical, and he is not capable of doing the reporting himself, and he is often unpleasant. So I spend several hours a month dealing with his wadded up receipts to document every ABLE expense. It's invasive and humiliating for him, and a huge burden for me.
I'm literally better off doing unpaid or minimum wage internships for the indefinite future until I can hit that benchmark.
My programs pay for everything. My food, my power bill, the interest on my student debt. And if I save one cent over $7200, I lose my medical subsidy so I'm constantly having to find inventive ways to spend money. It's a weird problem to have.
So I've had SSI my whole life essentially. I've had to live with these restrictions since I was basically 20. I moved out from living with my dad only a handful of years ago. I'm 33 now and I get 870 something dollars a month plus an extra from the state itself and I get supplemental nutrition food stamps and I also get my rent lowered and mostly taken care of and I just have to pay $103 a month for rent.
Doing literally anything that would be considered taking in income would just be stupid for me to do because of any of the penalization that comes with it. Saving money would just be not a good idea even though it would be a great idea to have some sort of a safety net... But my stepmother and actual father have things just in case for that for me so I'm lucky in that regard...
I have extreme anxiety when it comes to managing any of this or managing a lot of things especially over the phone and my dad has had to manage most of that for me directly and I've had to sign a lot of paperwork to make sure that he can talk for me. I basically consider if I didn't have him that I would be homeless or dead right now.
I had a single job during my adult life and I was only a couple years ago. It was through a job placement program for people with disabilities and I was working for some local racing engine shop that needed someone to help with computer things. I helped build them a website with e-commerce stuff all over it and made sure everything was following all the right rules to do all of that I help them build a Facebook presence... A whole lot of stuff in just a couple weeks. I was a brand new person working there out of only like five people that work there and I was the only one who had a brand new computer that I had to build myself out of parts they bought for me that I asked for... But none of that really matters because I realize that the woman at the job placement who managed my case was dating the owner of the engine shops son. As soon as I found this out that just gave me extreme anxiety every day and I felt like I was being just used and I quit. I'm not going to get exploited like that being somebody's computer monkey boy with no proper management.
So this punishes students who save their money, and rewards students who waste it on frivolous things.
Then there is the "spend down" for Medicaid. Same story - you need to waste your money before benefits kick in.
Also, people who take Social Security early, are prohibited from earning over a certain amount, but I think that’s different.
Some sued and got the decision canceled.
I guess it's an in-progress situation as the new government will try to pay all welfare potential recipients, not only just the ones who ask for it (about 1/3 of people who are eligible don't file for welfare). It's a bit of a problem because "counties" have more recipients than others, so it should be the whole state of france to take care of it.
So now I have to choose between early retirement and only getting about $320 per month or appealing my SSDI/SSI Case or just reapplying for Disability as someone over 62 years old. But low income retirees can not qualify for SSI until they reach 65 years old if they are not Disabled but the SSA has been bumbling Disability Reviews ever since congress/president allowed those Continuing Eligibility Reviews to begin again from the Pandemic forbearance period that's expired. And that's not been Fair for some elderly recipients because the SS offices are barely reopened and Congress just had hearings on the lack of SSA's ability to service SSA client requests. I was unable to get my appeal forms sent to me because the local SSA office was unable to be reached by Phone, so terrible is the SSA customer service system.
The SSA is so very much dysfunctional that congress needs to review each and every Elderly/Disabled person's Eligibility review for the past 6 months since that Eligibility review process was restarted. And that Asset limit forced me so save outside of the banking system in order to pay for some needed Crown replacements and other dental work because Medicaid/Medicare has limited Dental coverage. And that $2000 dollars will not even pay for a single Crown replacement at the going rate in the NE US for uninsured dental work(About $2800 for a single Crown and buildup for that crown).
Really all this SSI/SSDI and all the SSA administrative review costs to do all that for folks over 62 should be replaced by some Reformed Social Security income floor that sets the minimum SS benefit at 75% of the poverty level for anyone 62 years or older and then there would be no need for any retirees to be on SSI to begin with. SSI was created because of the SSA's inability to properly calculate the true costs of any projected future costs of living for low wage earners so the SSA/FICA/Retirement Taxes have been insufficient for many lifetime low wage earners.
Despite being highly educated and qualified, my spouse and I have to turn down work and stay within proximity to the poverty line to ensure access to healthcare for my spouse that has a chronic health condition.
There’s literally no reason to get a good job unless it pays $200k+ right off the bat, because up to that point healthcare costs would be in excess of 100% of our combined income.
This is intentional. The United States maintains a population of poor people by design. Any politician that says otherwise is literally lying!
This article is truly inspiring - I guess shouldn't be so hard on myself if the very government that runs this country is constantly [m]ucking things up time after time. But hey, the people affected are only the poor and the disabled who make up the bottom rung of our society, so who cares right? If anything 33 years was a blazing fast turnaround time.
Get a mortgage on house that will take a while to pay off.
In order to “save” you pay extra towards the mortgage
In order to “withdraw” money (if needed) you take out a small loan against the house
Some bank should make a mobile app which does this, in combination with Zelle.
SuperHomeSaverApp
With free instant transfer between your bank accounts and home
There’s a “cliff” that makes it so many people get stuck. There needs to be a gradual decline in assistance as income goes up, and it should never ever get cut off for got because of a fortunate month or year.
And those phases need to be market linked in some way
Who is "the government" in this case? What power do they have over this person? The power to stop them from saving money? How is that power useful or desirable to anybody?
If you are saying that people should be free from government's whims, congratulations, you've just discovered Democracy. Anyway, if your government has whims, the security of your home, food and livelihood is entirely dependent on them. It doesn't matter if you depend on social assistance.
The only question is what that level is at and how steeply the relevant taxes reduce turn its net benefit to a net cost, and that's something governments determine just like the tapering on any other form of benefit.
Since we don't have a wealth tax, there isn't even a smooth transition out along the dimension that the article discusses.
Nothing about a UBI prevents it from being coupled with a wealth tax (possibly even a regressive one which kicks in at low levels so recipients are disincentivised to save) if the government wishes to fund it that way... and they'll need to find additional funds from somewhere.
The only difference with UBI is the subsidy itself is a lot less targeted than "financial aid for registered disabled people", so the government has to find a lot more ways to claw it back from some sections of the population. That can be sneaky and regressive, just like a non-universal income only disabled people are entitled to can be completely without income and wealth qualifications if a government wants.
That's not a cutoff; it's a continuous function that crosses zero at some point. With a UBI funded by an income tax you're never worse off earning more.
Provided you can earn more without putting in any more effort; otherwise marginal effort eventually exceeds marginal net income, and the income tax shifts that crossover point toward a lower income where the effort remains worthwhile.
But you can't guarantee that "by design", only "by name." As we know with politics, the name of a program is not tightly coupled to its effect.
So far the strongest counter argument I have seen is "well then it wouldn't technically be UBI", which doesn't fix anything.
Even then you are subject to future amendments and future courts that interpret that what you really meant by “universal” was only that the government had to pay at least $0.01 to everyone so actually policy X is still universal. There are no “forever guarantees” and indeed that would be awful, the living should never be irrevocably bound by the hand of the dead.
I believe the fact these amounts are not pinned to inflation is generally intentional. The whole thing needs to be overhauled.
As such simply raising the limit doesn’t solve the problem, indexing the original limit to inflation would.
How ‘free from material suffering’ entitlement going to be paid for, and what does that even mean? Houses for everyone? Gold bars for everyone?
Living standards can and will change over time. It’s not possible to live without a phone and internet access anymore, you can’t even do a lot of these papers and applications for government functions (let alone private employment) anymore unless you’re online.
Our grandchildren won’t be able to live without their neurallink even though it was a “luxury” to us.
1) asking what that even means, practically, and
2) how it could be accomplished using any known economic means without, say, hyper-inflating everything first to the point we’d never get there.
Does it mean a free Harvard education to everyone? Or a free Twinkie? Does it mean a free house 5 minutes from downtown SF? Or free drugs to make everyone happy no matter where they are?
The argument against this is that people will say "well what about internet access, is internet access a human right since it's now ubiquitous? What about refrigerators and microwaves?" The answer is yes. As the standard of living rises for the average person through innovation, it should also rise for the lowest in society.
I’ve seen it work short term where there is existing stock built under a different scheme that can be ‘locked in’ to this. But then it quickly goes to a different kind of broken, where housing is ‘cheap’ but impossible to find unless you can get a friend to (usually illegally) sublet.
The issue for a long time has been the fed printing money with pretty much no interrupting since ‘01. When they tried to take a break around ‘05 things got bad by ‘08 and they turned it on even higher.
When money is cheap, people do steadily riskier and riskier things until it explodes. Then money has to get more expensive to help rein in the stupidity. So we’ll likely see housing get more affordable again for a bit. If we really wanted cheap housing, we need decently high interest rates.
Here is the fed funds rate chart [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS]
Here is the case Schiller housing price index [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPISA]
When money is cheap, people try to make more money by buying and leveraging assets. Homeowners do the same thing, though they usually don’t realize it.
That pushes demand and prices up. After all, people will buy more when it’s ‘cheap’, and that is based off the monthly loan servicing costs - aka interest rate, in large part.
I am aware that cheap Fed money keeps our markets propped up with speculative investing. My point is that food, housing, and medicine are not constrained by financial bottlenecks, it's a matter of political will. If we wanted to provide food, shelter, and medicine for all of our citizens for free we easily could. However that would reduce profit margins as labor costs would rise in an already relatively (compared to the developing world) labor market. Free housing could be provided but it would be detrimental to REITs and banks who provide mortgages, so we don't actually want to solve the problem.
I have friends who have, and it replaces a tense landlord relationship with a overbearing, bureaucratic dystopia where attempts to escape (say by saving money for a reserve fund or to afford to move to a better place) are actively criminalized. In any larger scale system, it inevitably results in severe restrictions on things normal people do regularly on pain of eviction (such as smoking weed, or having a boyfriend!), after already requiring they have minimal savings and income below some threshold (see above), which inevitably leads to abuse by whichever civil servant or subcontractor is actually running it.
It’s basically replacing a landlord who you could at least plausibly ‘fire’ at the end of the lease with an appointed bureaucrat or lowest-bidder who you can’t.
Lack of political will is just a way of saying ‘when the rubber hits the road, no one is willing to pay for it or interested enough to make it happen’.
Which hey, maybe. But in my experience these are for reasons that require time and expertise to understand, and often boil down to ‘the people/society involved couldn’t make it work’.
If you can lead a successful effort to make something better work, be my guest!
But like kids caught in the middle of a nasty divorce, wishing they liked each other isn’t going to change it, and the folks most impacted by it are usually helpless to do anything but get the brunt of the terrible outcomes.
Those markets in Vienna yiu mention - by any chance are the current landlords the ones who were also there when they passed these rules, so were stuck? Or got into it via inheritance?
Or perhaps they have long standing ties to the community and are doing it because it may not make them money, but helps them in other ways?
Does Vienna have a decent safety net and a coherent social identity so that folks (both giving and receiving) feel they’re helping out ‘one of theirs’, and people aren’t likely to abuse the system?
https://borgenproject.org/housing-homeless-saves-taxpayers-m...
To answer the specific questions about Vienna, I believe the public housing started in the 1910s and 1920s under the socialist government, and today over 60% of Viennese residents live in the public housing. Public housing does not have the same issues as rent control. Rent control does not work long-term as it disincentivizes construction and competition. Establishing a price floor through public housing still leaves landlords open to large profit margins in higher-class housing, or higher-density housing, and encourages development.
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/03/in-vienna-public-hous...
Our bloated bureaucracy is a symptom of American social programs needing to be means-tested because we are culturally opposed to welfare programs. We have to have a purity test for everyone receiving a handout-- meanwhile there is no means testing for subsidies and bailouts for corporations who are at risk of default every time we turn the money faucet off. It's an incredible double-standard where we scrutinize the most vulnerable in society while creating a massive moral hazard for our largest companies.
If the society is cohesive and coherent enough it sees it as a public good and not ‘hand outs to the others’, it can work. The larger the scale, and more geographically separated, the less likely though in my experience.
Hospitals will treat people in the emergency room and ICU, whether or not they can pay. That ends up being way more expensive, to the precious taxpayer, than keeping folks out of the hospital in the first place. Penny wise, pound foolish.
You know how when kids first hear about tax brackets and misunderstand them to mean that someone earning near the top of one bracket could get a raise of $x and end up having their tax bill increase by more than $x? We don't do that because it's universally agreed to be a bad system: it encourages you to stay poor. Instead of diminishing returns for more work, you get negative returns for more work.
Luckily, our tax system is (relatively) sane and uses marginal tax brackets to avoid this outcome. The SSI policy does not—it has this exact failure mode.