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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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...