Disabled people tried to play by the rules. It cost them their federal benefits | Hacker News Reader

Disabled people tried to play by the rules. It cost them their federal benefits

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47 pointsrntn55 comments

In many places in the US, it is hard to find a place to rent for less than $2000 dollars per month. That seems absurdly low to limit your total assets to. That also seems like a way to trap people in poverty, since saving money for something that might allow you to work, like education, a vehicle, assets to start a business, etc. would mean giving up your income.

And I assume renting in the US these days means you'll need a 2xMonth bond in addition to your normal rent in advance, like here, meaning you need savings of 3xMonthly-rent to even consider moving, probably more unless you intend to move using a borrowed shopping trolly.

Depends on the place but plenty of properties I’ve seen are one month in advance. Arguably still rough but not the 3x in advance kind of rough

Not defending the $2000 rule, but there are charities that will give you move in costs if you are on SSI and bring them a lease agreement.

Which is an utter failure. The government has set the limit so low that people who take the assistance much rely on the grace of others or become homeless. The limit should be set to the federal poverty level. Having assets that amount to literal poverty wages is not wealth building or cheating the system and would make life possible. Setting it to take would be appalling as well, but at least defendable. I have no idea how anyone even came up with the 2K number. I assume the federal poverty rate on a monthly level, but people should be allowed to have savings.

The asset limit hasn't been updated in 50 years. It would be almost 10k if it kept up with inflation

Better be careful though, sounds like lots of help like that counts as 'income' so will screw with your ssi check too.

No, a charitable donation that does not recur is not considered income. (Ditto financial aid for students.)

And of course, the average 'end all benefits' type of person will shout 'these are the exceptions, it's the cheats that we want to stop', newsflash, these ARE the cheats the system claims are the problem, they're not the exception, the cruelty to otherwise normal people is the whole point

Yep. I’m guessing discussion of politics is against forum rules but I think it’s clear to a lot of us that a significant percentage of US voters are very let’s say… Darwinian about how they think about things (even though, ironically, many of them don’t believe in evolution). Of course this worldview is counterproductive, America would be much better off in the long run if we had a more compassionate approach to everything. People want to charge kids for lunch at school, as if society as a whole wouldn’t be better off if kids were well fed when they’re trying to learn. It’s not just that their worldview is immoral, it’s deeply counterproductive and puts a lot of strain on the social fabric.

I was curious what a significant percentage might be as it just feels odd at first glance that a large percentage of the US population would rather children go hungry if they can't pay for lunch at school. About the worst stat I could come up with was that 20% opposed extension of universal free breakfast and lunch to all students. Of course that 20% is largely in opposition to the universal part more than wanting the children unable to pay to go hungry. In all it's surprising there is any single digit percentage that would oppose this but it disagrees with what most would expect in terms of numbers to a significant percentage holding this view. Doubly so when the comparison provided is a ~35% viewpoint (percentage varies depending on how you frame and measure the question).

Another interesting stat I found along the way was more children were receiving free or reduced lunch than not even prior to the pandemic.

The percentage is high enough that it’s difficult to enact free lunch programs.

Can't even enact free free lunch programs:

https://apnews.com/article/states-rejecting-federal-funds-su...

It's difficult to enact the programs because people disagree on how they are run. All students or some students? What's the bar on the latter? How is it funded? Should it be a federally organized program or should the states lead how they do their own? Should it come with a mandate of food healthiness, what's that bar if so? Is it a school only supplemental program or should it be a change to a general welfare program (the latter having a whole set of debate how it should be done if its own)?

Very low on the list of reasons it's difficult is the percentage of those just plain not interested in the idea. It may seem silly ("we all agree no kid should go hungry at school so why haven't we done it universally") but picking that one reason out of the hat and holding it out as why isn't helping anything.

From what I can tell a lot of it comes down to whether someone cares more about making sure that everyone who needs help gets it or cares more about making sure that no one who doesn't need help gets it.

Funding is finite. Someone who doesn't need a benefit and receives it can be taking that benefit away from someone else. If you turn up at a food bank when you don't need to you're taking food out of someone else's mouth.

It costs more to determine who should receive the benefit than to simply provide it for everyone. Who gives a shit if a rich kid gets a free school lunch? They have to be at school. Feeding everyone should be a cost of the education system, the same way keeping the lights on and the temperature moderate is. Or should kids start having to pay for the light above their desk? For each drink at the water fountain? Maybe we can use cameras and some AI to tally up the expected utilities bill for each student and send that to the parents.

Rich kids can bring their own lights. /s

I've known people who care more about preventing undeserving people from receiving help even if the cost of enforcement is greater than the cost of abuse.

There is always that guy, well lots of that guy, that obviously wish the losers would go off and die somewhere so they can enjoy their winnings without having to think about them. And these people hate anything that forces them to rub shoulders with losers. They hate cities, public transit, flying coach. And especially hate sick people. You might have asked who leaves their wife when they get cancer, these guys.

When it comes to the resources used by disabled people I think of comments by Nolan Bushnell in a dead tree magazine interview. The interviewer asked him how he deals with unproductive engineers and Nolan says he didn't care about unproductive engineers. Because an unproductive engineer just wastes his salary. What he cared about was negatively productive engineers. And managers especially. What I see is there are a lot of heavily compensated people who destroy value their whole careers. And those people take a far and away bigger share than all the disabled people.

Where this tends to be going is a lot of that guy are the above, highly compensated less than worthless people. consider as you're career progressed up. Maybe when you started working most people around you had lower end jobs and were productive. And as you went up the percentage of people actually pulling their weight went down.

So yes most people doesn't mind people on disability. But the thin upper strata of that guys sure do.

What’s your source for this? The purpose of the asset limit is to force middle class people to use up their assets before the public will start paying. Thats an entirely reasonable policy decision.

Does an asset limit of 2,000 set in 1980 without any inflation adjustments and a hard cliff benefit removal sound sensible?

It makes sense if you don’t think about it too much.

Is that where that came from? I used an inflation calculator and honestly, it would be extremely reasonable to say someone can't have more than 8K in savings and get this benefit. I hate that the US government never sets anything to inflation so we always have to play these games for everything with benefits.

> tly, it would be extremely reasonable to say someone can't have more than 8K in savings

Even 8k is really not "middle class" at all. Middle class is "I have 6 months to a year of income saved up in case of emergencies" and that isn't your 401k.

Socioeconomic class is not defined by assets, but rather by income or if you want to get a little more sophisticated (to cover the case of the young person about to graduate from medical school) potential to earn income.

Of course, if you have enough assets, you can derive reliable investment income from those assets, but $8K of assets will not reliably generate enough income to matter when considering what class the person is.

In other words, if you have $8K in assets, but zero potential to earn income from your labor, you definitely do not meet the bar for being middle class.

> Socioeconomic class is not defined by assets, but rather by income or if you want to get a little more sophisticated (to cover the case of the young person about to graduate from medical school) potential to earn income

This doesn't make much sense to me. So a retired wealthy person who can draw income from investments is not upper class, even if they draw an income that would be considered middle class or lower?

The point is that although income is not a perfect proxy for the nuanced thing that we mean by "socioeconomic class", it is a better proxy than net worth is.

Why is it better if it can't account for things like inherited wealth? Are the descendants of billionaires not upper class at birth, with no income?

It does account for the person who inherited $10 million or more because $10 million throws off at least $300,000 a year in reliable investment income, making that person upper class according to the income proxy.

My standard for lower income class / middle income class / upper income class (not social, just income) is something along the lines of:

Lower class: Has little or no savings, probably works a "gig" job that pays on 1099s. Maybe has several part time jobs.

Middle class: Has 3-6+ months savings, the vast majority of their income is reported on a single W2 or 1099. Or they own a sole proprietorship kind of business. Either way, the majority of their income is coming from work or services. Net worth: Probably under $5M.

Upper class: The vast majority of their income is reported as capital gains. Owns multiple real estate properties. Net worth: 5-$500M.

Elite Upper class: I don't even know what to describe this as

As long as all wheelchairs and prosthetics are absolutely below $8k, since this is disabled people we're talking about.

8k would mean that it would be very difficult for them to ever have a significant vacation (e.g. seeing another country). Depending on what counts as an asset, I could see most serious hobbyists having more than $8K in various tools and equipment.

Basically, it seems to me that an $8K limit on assets could effectively mean that people on disability are not allowed to have a life.

How much does a car cost?

Your car does not count towards the asset limit as long as you own only one.

It sounds like typical government implementation shortcomings in a program that doesn’t get that much attention because most people never need or use it. That hardly warrants OP’s sweeping indictment, or baseless assertion that “the cruelty to otherwise normal people is the whole point.”

No that's not reasonable. It fucks people over that save their money and rewards people that waste it. You pay taxes, you get the same benefits as everybody else is a reasonable policy.

The problem is the total gotcha attitude they're taking with it. They have to justify their jobs somehow and in the absence of actual problems they'll find "problems".

Besides, this is the standard Republican approach: mess things up so the people getting benefits don't. Hopefully they die and cease to be a problem. Request documentation, but the system is overloaded and it doesn't get processed, documentation "not provided", they must not be eligible anymore. We have seen it again and again with Medicaid. Or request documentation on a website that can't handle the load. (Or fails in odd ways. Wasn't a government system but I got hit by it on a private forum once--upload an image, it just vanishes. Yeah, my image was big--specifically in spoiler tags to keep from disrupting things. Turns out there was both a pixel size limit and a megabyte limit, break both and there was an error on the error and the whole error went to lala land. Successfully uploaded nothing.) And a *lot* of systems impose size limits on images that are smaller than what modern phones take.

> The problem is the total gotcha attitude they're taking with it. They have to justify their jobs somehow and in the absence of actual problems they'll find "problems.” Besides, this is the standard Republican approach

As if the people running the SSA are “Republicans.” 95% of federal employees donated to Hilary Clinton: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/302817-government-work...

Clinton got 95% of the donations made. That is not anywhere close to 95% of employees. She got $1.9M and there are close to 3 million federal employees.

That’s a pretty good proxy for support unless there’s any reason why democrats would be more likely to donate than republicans.

The definition they use for a bank account counting as yours is "can you access it": so if you're able to sign checks for anyone else, including a business, that account balance counts towards the asset limit too.

That sounds absurdly idiotic and almost vindictive.

This distinction and overlap also comes into play for the medicaid "asset spend down." If you share any financial assets with your parents, be sure to separate entirely 5 years before they apply for medicaid or you will need to either count it as gone or buy it out at FMV.

Don't know why you're being downvoted.

I can see why the rule exists, it's simpler to simply decree this than it is to sort out whether you're simply managing money that is not yours. Doesn't make it the right answer, though.

Because this forum is full of libertarians lol. That’s why.

One day a federal research grant will fund a project that determines the specific form of brain damage that leads to libertarianism.

I don’t think their attitude is indicative of some sort of brain damage. It’s likely that their opinions come from deep in the lizard brain and played a role in human survival at some point. It’s possible that libertarians have certain personality traits in common with conservatives like low openness and low conscientiousness. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they’re statistically more likely to have low empathy - they also have very “small” minds - they don’t think about the big picture. I don’t even necessarily think that these traits are hard wired, it’s just that they’ve fed into their own attitudes and in general it’s hard to move someone from low openness to high openness especially (unless you give them psychedelics). There’s also an entire propaganda machine in the US owned and operated by some very rich and powerful people that’s designed to feed into all of the personality / thinking styles I listed above to get these people to vote against their own self interests and the interests of others. Sad situation all around, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t deeply resent them, even if they are brainwashed and operating from a place of ignorance and fear.

A lot of people are talking about the low asset limit, but a relatively new account type gets ignored by that limit. An ABLE account. It’s not perfect and asset limits are way too low, but this type of account greatly helps people with disabilities save/invest up to $100k without counting against the limit. It is restricted to specific uses, but it’s very broad and pretty much anything but alcohol and gambling can be spent on from it.

https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/spotlights/spot-able.html

Unless I'm missing something, it appears only those who were disabled before the age of 26 qualify... That seems VERY limiting.

Crazy that the asset limit isn't tied to inflation, but the payments are.

> Williams, who is disabled and doesn’t work, relied upon a little-known federal assistance program — Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, run by the Social Security Administration.

What kind of circles does the author run in where SSI is obscure?

There are two forms of Social Security disability benefits, one paid from payroll taxes (SSDI) and one from general tax revenues (SSI, this one). I for one was not really aware of the distinction.

https://www.usa.gov/social-security-disability

https://blog.ssa.gov/understanding-social-security-disabilit...

From my families experience, SSI is very hard to qualify for; it’s for when you have not worked long enough to pay into and qualify for SSDI, which is more lenient. I can imagine it’s rare comparatively; especially if you don’t associate with people who have never really had a job.

I don't think it's all that rare. It's all the people that grew up with medical issues that preclude work. It's just that until the internet such people tended to be pretty isolated from most of society.

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