"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.
I am in the process of applying for SSDI right now. AMAA, I suppose.
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.
Fraud paranoia seems to keep constant downward pressure on our social safety net. We'd rather scrap a life-saving system than accept a minimal level of fraud. Just imagine if retail businesses operated this way and shut down at the first sign of shoplifting. Instead, they mitigate where possible and treat the result as a cost-of-doing-business.
I'm pretty sure means tested welfare is specifically intended to be difficult and unpopular. If it was conceived and implemented well then it might just become a popular policy! And then that ofc slippery slopes into the US becoming a welfare state where no one wants to work (in the minds of some elites).
It’s becoming exactly the same story in the UK under the conservative government, people with lifelong disabilities forced to be assessed regularly to prove their legs or arms haven’t grown back or they haven’t grown out of their cerebral palsy etc.
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.
One solution to this is to have fixed size budgets for assistance programs. Eg. Each week 1% of GDP will be spent on XYZ assistance program.
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.
I assisted someone in the process to receive SSDI and it was the most kafkaesque process I've ever experienced. I think every individual person at the SSA involved in the case was trying their best, but it really feels like the organization functions in a way to prevent as many people as possible from getting the benefits they qualify for.
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.
'The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.'
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.
Having been through the process myself, remember to keep your self worth guarded against the summation of what they conclude you're capable of. If you make it to a hearing a judge will gavel your disability into legality after a jury of doctors and vocational experts read your verdict. You seem like a good person and these experiences shouldn't take away from that. Thanks for putting yourself out there.
From my experience, it seems the fraud paranoia actually trends towards increasing the relative fraud rate. The layers of bullshit serve to trip up and exclude those the programs are meant to serve but don’t bother the fraudsters at all. Layers of bureaucracy don’t hurt people who are willing to just lie - it’s like why dishonest witnesses are often more compelling. It’s much easier to tell an internally consistent story when it’s all fabricated.
Of course; I’m sure that, if it were easy enough, people would commit social security fraud.
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 apologize; it was a little glib. I'm sure that the way it works isn't Pareto optimal; and there is clearly a problem in the U.S. of using shaming as a tool to discourage consumption of means-tested benefits, as opposed to focusing on actual good governance.
No worries! You’re not out of line for being concerned about this stuff.
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. :-)
Yes; in fact, there's excellent evidence from the IRS that the level of misreporting on tax returns increases with the opacity and difficulty of verification of income source. There's hardly any fraud for W-2 employees, and relatively large amounts of it for passthrough businesses like partnership and S-corps.
The piece of advice I can give you is: Get an attorney! It will only cost you 30% of your SSDI benefits for the first year, capped at $6,000. It's well worth the cost.
This right here. People claim tax law is bad but disability law is almost as bad in that no reasonable person could be expected to know all the details in the laws.
Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.
Sure. In 2017 I started getting head-splitting migraines.
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.
Thanks for sharing and sorry to hear about that. I can relate a little to the migraines. I had some blinding migraines come on quickly a few years ago, but then leave just as quickly. The pain was so intense I could barely think straight during those periods. Thankfully they disappeared. Similarly, I had some head x-rays that yielded nothing out of the ordinary.
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
Honestly, part of it is that it’s not even fair for me to present myself as “able to work” right now.
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.
I most recently saw that with some criticisms of Section 8 housing.
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.
> 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.
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.
A mini rant - short term residential rentals are the housing equivalent of payday lending in finance - a market that exists by extorting impoverished people.
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.
Wow you mean to say you don't get a discount when you pay month to month over a year long commitment? Pretty much everything is like that including virtually all SaaS pricing models.
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 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.
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 don't think PragmaticPulp is saying anything about requiring people to rent before getting a house. Just that the purpose of section 8 housing is to help people who can't afford rents. If someone is saving for a house, I think that's a sign that that person can afford rents, and therefore isn't the target for section 8 housing.
If the government is going to pay or subsidize rent for someone, I’m ok with there being a requirement that such support is needed by that recipient.
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.
I agree that not allowing savings for a mortgage probably isn't a huge issue in practice, but discouraging saving in general is completely bonkers policy.
Oh, I agree. Savings of some form should be encouraged. Various cliffs are bad policy.
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.
> If someone can find a path to jump from dependency to ownership, why "should" aid programs be structured to prevent that?
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.
Renting is supposed to be a much shorter commitment that lets people move around. It shouldn’t be cheaper in a market that’s allowed to function. If anything, the optionality and added risk should have a cost, which is also why a hotel room costs more per day or week than renting.
> It shouldn’t be cheaper in a market that’s allowed to function.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Because the next step from subsidized housing is to renting.
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?
> Going straight from subsidized rental housing to home ownership doesn’t make sense
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.
Isn't there just an element of basic fairness to this? The budget for Section 8 is only so much, and people who can afford market rent need to be moving out of the program to make way for others.
If you care about people not ending up on the same program again, shoving them out the door the second they can nominally pay full price themselves doesn't help,
I agree, however, there needs to be some sort of means test and phase-out. It’s equally absurd that somebody receiving Section 8 benefits should be able to save at a higher rate than somebody just outside the benefit range (and saving at a rate that buys a house above and beyond a reasonable emergency fund likely does that).
Phase-out is the key that's missing from so many assistance programs. It's the same with Medicaid, which really discourages you from taking that next step up to a slightly better-paying job, especially if you have a chronic health condition.
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.
SSI already has an income phase-out (not a cliff), as discussed in the article. The problem is the phase-out starts at $85 (!) and benefits steeply decline once you are in the phase-out, not that there isn’t a phase-out at all.
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?
How do? Allowing recipients of public assistance to accumulate more savings than those just outside the program would be a perverse incentive to join the program.
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 only way is to put savings under your mattress and that is extremely likely to get stolen (usually by relatives or "friends"). It's an awful catch 22.
They're not easy to find. I got a notice last month from my credit union that I need to plan move my stuff out of my deposit box.
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.
There is no asset limitation for participation in HUD assisted-housing programs.
However, the definition of annual income includes net income from family assets.
I may have remembered incorrectly but I believe it was in the context of the New York Housing Authority and I just made the perhaps incorrect assumption that it was Section 8. I tried to find the article itself but couldn't find it quickly.
You folks managing Privately Run for Profit/Non Profit Section 8 housing units management firms are just derelict in your Duty as the US Government/FCC has billions of dollars of Funding Made available for High Speed Internet assistance for the poor but the Privately Run Section 8 housing entities(For Profit or Non Profit) are not even applying for the funds because they are too cheap to hire Grant Writers to apply for the funding.
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.
Too late to edit, but I think this was actually in the context of New York City Housing Authority and not Section 8. I tried to track down the article but couldn't find it quickly.
> 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.
When I was a student and wanted to get a small job to get some pocket money, I couldn't, because after reporting it, my mom would lose some family benefits and we'd be worse off at the end of the day. This was a recurring theme until I graduated and went on my own.
It's amazing how many people see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, and then turn around and claim that everything will be better when the government runs everything in the economy.
It’s amazing how people could see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, then go around insisting we add more means testing to benefits because it would be horrible if people got help who “didn’t deserve it”.
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.
Very snarky response. I think the poster you replied to was trying to point out that the reason this happens is because the government prints money and if they don't take the money out of circulation via taxes then inflation becomes an issue.
This is the one-two punch that Republicans use to kill social programs.
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.
I mean, I get it that the Republicans like to destroy this shit.
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.
Democrats have had the power to pass legislation without Republican support during the following periods:
* 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.
> 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.
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.)
Even amongst the left, the narrative of the welfare queen is strong. Eliminating means testing is so easily attacked that it is a challenging policy to propose.
This isn't to let the Democrats off the hook, only to explain that Democratic voters are not uniformly behind improving these policies.
By the standards of the rest of the world, the US Democrats are centre-right and American politics have no left. It’s really astonishing how different the Overton window is (and concerning how much my home country is importing US politics.
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.
> The democrat-voting population is farther left than the democrat politicians.
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 feel like this is a popular cop out answer, that while likely having some degree of truth, over-simplifies the issues in government.
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.
How exactly does someone like Jeff Bezos benefit from a welfare system that is both inefficient and costly? If politicians are really so easily "bought" by the wealthy, then we'd see more legislation that wealthy people care about, but we don't even see that either. Oracle v. Google and net neutrality end up being decided by the unelected officials because Congress refuses to do anything, but virtue signal all day. Bernie actually tries to pass real legislation, but all this new wave of politicians including AOC cares about is seeking more political power. Every bill she sponsors looks like they're designed to not get passed but rile up her base.
If the Democratic Party-voting population was really that much farther left than the Democratic Party politicians, then you'd really expect that farther left candidates would be winning primaries, wouldn't you?
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.
This isn't really the gotcha moment you think it is. Primaries are, well, mostly a farce and the people that show up for the primaries are the ones that often have the most free time or ability to do so. Retirees, wealthier individuals and so forth. There's no better evidence of this fact than candidates like Bernie Sanders having extremely high popularity among the younger generation which tapers off the older people get. There's a massive and growing generational divide that's only going to get better once the voting block that enables them starts dying off.
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.
OK; but no-one's even slightly suggesting that (insert any Democratic candidate's name here) is in danger of losing a race for a NY Senate seat, and that particular post has given us Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.
> This is the one-two punch that Republicans use to kill social programs.
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.
And yet, when the Democrats control Congress and the presidency (like they do now, like they did in 2010), they do absolutely nothing to show us how wonderful their programs could be -- if only they had control!
Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.
They don't actually have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support though. Outside of budget reconciliation, neither party has had the power to pass legislation without at least some bipartisan support since Ted Kennedy was replaced in 2010.
They do have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support, actually. They can pass a separate bill to suspend the filibuster on another bill, and suspending the filibuster only requires the 50 Democrat Senators and the VP.
They tried to do so in January but Manchin and Sinema voted against it.
There's nothing stopping the single party wealthy states like CA and NY implementing whatever they want. Just raise taxes on the rich and do whatever you want with their money, right?
It's happening mostly because the politicians advocating for these dysfunctional policies are ignorants corrupted by their business friends who really don't want people to feel safe enough to ask for more money.
At least here in Europe. Speaking from experience.
We have several people directly profiting from several ineffective policies targeting disadvantaged in the local Parliament.
How would you solve this without the government? I can't see why private companies would be incentivized to do this. And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem.
>And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem.
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.
Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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.
> 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"
"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.
>"Expanding welfare programs = more control" is some tinfoil hat thinking.
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?
No, they weren’t. You’re dreaming about a time that never existed, or where it did exist was completely incapable of scaling and weathering economic downturns. It’s a common conservative narrative, but it simply isn’t based on reality.
>You’re dreaming about a time that never existed, or where it did exist was completely incapable of scaling and weathering economic downturns.
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.
> Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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?
Charitable programs in places of worship existed long before government programs. These are communities of people giving their time, money, and resources, and are actually invested in the people they are helping. If you don't believe they ever helped anyone, then we fundamentally disagree on historical facts.
Literally nobody is disputing that charities in places of worship "ever helped anyone". What's in dispute is whether they would have sufficient resources and the will to help everyone.
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.
Please assume I'm a reasonable person enough to not say that nobody has ever received help, and see the context as to what I meant - that many people do not receive enough help.
Exactly what time period in what part of the world are you thinking of? If you go back too far, you'll hit a time when places of worship were the government, or at least so entangled in it as to make no difference. If you don't go back far enough, you'll hit a time when work houses and sanitariums were commonplace, which might be inhumane by modern standards, but definitely count as "government programs to help the poor."
Those charitable programs exist now. There's nothing stopping them from existing. So why does the problem still exist then? And more importantly: Why have other countries solved this in a far better manner than the US?
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.
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.
> Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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?
There was some charitable support at times in history.
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.
>except the countless hours my parents have spent helping her.
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.
So I take it that you host a disabled person in your home, then?
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.
My favorite one is the process of moving between states on medicaid.
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.
We may be hosting my partner's aunt or grandmother soon, since they will likely have nobody closer to look after them. Did I pass your "is a good person" test?
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.
"Society" is not some autonomous external being that is free to do how it pleases. It is composed of individuals making decisions. If the decisions of the individuals are coerced, then the society's aggregate behavior is coerced.
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.
> Wouldn't you be happy if more people were like your parents?
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.
Niche subreddits for medical conditions I can’t imagine anybody would spend the time of their days LARPing in, my own medical groups in which people tend to also face severe financial issues for a variety of reasons with ~30k combined people & ~5k active
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)
I said "first hand" experience intentionally, and the reason is because the content that you're reading is going to be biased towards the people writing it. Just like anyone who is recollecting a bad situation and outcome, they are going to leave things out, misrepresent what was said, and sometimes straight up lie to take any blame off of themselves. They're not LARPing so much as they're extremely biased about what happened. I grew up in a Christian school, attending multiple churches, and I have NEVER once seen someone turned away in the way that you describe. Does that mean it doesn't happen? No, there are shitty people everywhere. But these places are known for bending over backwards to help vulnerable people, at least that has been my first hand experience.
Local charities don't even fully cover the holes in the existing welfare system. Why would you expect them to be able to bear the full burden in its stead?
I don't think people are arguing for no government assistance program, they're observing that it's incentivizing staying in the program rather than the assumed intended use, helping someone get on their feet again
Well, it is the government that’s providing the help in the first place.
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.
It's not the fault of government per se, but puritanical conservatives in government who think any assistance to disadvantaged people is coddling lazy slackers.
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.
As I get older I see more and more of “reducing gov’t waste” as a means to funnel money into private individuals’ pockets. See also for-profit prisons, charter schools, bussing, medical care, etc etc.
And yet, some countries and cultures have safety nets that work.
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.
“For decades most airplane crashes have been caused by trained pilots and yet we continue to put trained pilots in the cockpit.” This form of argument almost looks compelling until you realize that it is predicated on some unspoken belief that there is a clear better alternative.
Aren't most of these absurd rules the result of elected legislators putting on a show for their voters rather than the result of professional beurocrats making arbitrary rules because they felt like it?
It's the politicians with your antigovernment attitude that make these programs so awful. Then they turn around and point at the mess they helped create as the reason they're antigovernment.
And even if people aren't cheating it, just make up stories about people doing to so to justify shutting it down! The "welfare queen" archetype is so strong in the minds of people in this country that it prevents all sorts of useful policy.
We want to help people who don’t make a lot of money. Governments are imperfect institutions yes, but what alternative is there to send money to people who need it ?
> "Assistance" programs meant to prop people up with so many reporting requirements and perverse incentives that punish you for improving your situation...
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.
There is not fine line we are just flat out dumber than rocks. Its incredibly simple in fact. Lets talk about subject of the article disability income.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Nope. This makes no sense. You're replacing their income because they can't generating any. That's it.
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.
> 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.
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?
Insurance in the US is often private. Private insurance companies push pretty hard to not pay for things that people don't need (to the point of sometimes not paying for things that people do need, but that's a different topic).
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.
I'd use the same idea in the justice system, where the presumption of innocence is paramount, and apply it here. It's better to let 9 criminals go free, than to jail 1 innocent person by accident, and it is better to assist 9 extra people in need, than to let one person in need to not get it due to the rules.
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.
It's actually super easy to do. See, you just...make sure that rather than cliffs, you have percentage based reduction of benefits. I.e., you lose $1 of benefit for every $2 you make, or whatever. And something similar with assets (though admittedly the details would be trickier to avoid it being gamed).
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.
As discussed elsewhere in the comments here, and as discussed in the article, there is indeed a phaseout for income. Every $1 you make above $85 reduces your benefits by $0.50, so they are doing exactly what you suggest.
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.
Not for SSDI. There’s a strict cutoff that’s adjusted every year. This year it’s $1350 — if you make more than $1350 any given month, you do not receive benefits for that month.
From my post - 'And something similar with assets (though admittedly the details would be trickier to avoid it being gamed).'
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.
I don't know why you'd have any wealth cutoff. This is a replacement for their income because they can't make any income due to disability. What business does anyone have dictating anything else about their life. None. That's very authoritarian.
One issue if that if you have multiple benefits, and each phases out over a similar range, the combined total loss can be over 100%.
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.
Oh, agreed; it's why I don't call out specific benefits (since I know they have different rules and such). My intention there is to generalize to all of them.
> It's actually super easy to do. See, you just...make sure that rather than cliffs, you have percentage based reduction of benefits.
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.)
I filed for unemployment for a few months during the pandemic (film industry. Literally no work available). The most insane revelation, as this was my first time filing, was that I had to file every single week. All for a paltry $247/wk (without the federal addition during Covid).
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.
Just think of the folks in your local Theater/Trade Show Union branch and the Broadway season ends and the slow summer months begins where at the same time the Trade Show season is at its low point(Summer Months), And UI insurance is sometimes the only way to make it through the Summer Months In the Big Easy and for Union members that are not high up on the Seniority roster. You are Studio Mechanics/Related Local folks and if you can get some Movie/TV production work over the summer you have it good there as after summer is over you can go over to the Theater/Trade Show local in the non summer months and get some extra work there.
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.
It doesn't even have to be the case that, as you say, "it is more expensive to earn any income than it is to earn none". That describes an implicit tax rate of >100% which would certainly discourage work, but even if it were, say, 75%, I don't think you have to be a hard-core republican to believe that that might disincentivize work and be on the far side of the Laffer curve.
If you consider the (conditional) basic income in Germany ("Grundsicherung") as given, and it's partial reduction in the face of more than 100€/month income as income tax, one reaches the asymptotic effective (average, not marginal) tax rate of the super-rich at about 180~200€/month.
It's progressive until around 1500€/month of income (if it was salary), after which it's regressive.
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)).
If UBI is paid out through printing extra currency, it will induce inflation.
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.
UBI is a pretty small money faucet compared to the endless spending on foreign wars that the US political establishment regularly undertakes. Just give out the same amount of money to poor people instead of using it as a middle-class jobs program that kills foreigners.
This is what many low income buildings become. They take 30% of your gross income so any small raise get's immediately reduced by half and sucked into the machine. Unless you can get a huge salary increase above the average wage you can never save enough to move into a property outside of the system even after your rent reaches parity with average rent prices. The only thing one can do is to quit working
legally which reduces the rent and frees you up to find cash work.
That's way less of a problem. It's not great when half a raise goes to rent and half goes into your pocket, but it doesn't hold a candle to policies where the entire raise disappears or you actually end up with less money.
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.
When I went to Europe backpacking the rude shocker was waking up in the middle of the night because that seat was not reserved. I thought that train only had unreserved seats. From next day I started adding reservation with that extra cost every time I had to reserve seats or berths and then seeing a lot of Europe essentially had just buses as public transports and not trains (esp. when I moved towards Eastern Europe -- also in Sarajevo I believe the pass didn't work, I had bought that in AMS).
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?
You're talking about the welfare trap. That's not what the article is about. The article is about disabled people who are unable to work being kept poor. Many people will never work because they can't and this punishes all of them.
What do you mean? People who don’t pay their student loans face all kinds of negative consequences from being unable to buy a home / car due to credit dings, tax refund garnishment & wage garnishment on top of fees & interest
If you believe there's a meaningful likelihood of that happening any time soon, then sure, you might consider stopping payments for some short period of time to see if it plays out. But that's hardly what I would call "a crazy system where a graduate is a fool to pay back the education loans."
I don’t understand your point. if you’re saying it would be wise to take advantage of current 0% interest and/or deferment policies to pay as little as possible until it’s clearer whether or not any kind of loan forgiveness will happen, then sure. not paying at all is really not an option over the long term.
I am not optimistic that Biden will attempt to use executive powers to make any broad student loan cancelations.
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.
Why would someone be a fool to pay? Biden was previously advocating for only $10k which doesn't cover the median federal student loan amount. $50k may not even happen. Right now you can pay down some of the principle at 0% interest in case your loans aren't forgiven.
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.
If you pay back your loans responsibly, and another doesn't and gets their balance forgiven, who's the fool?
> 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.
I think the basic disconnect you're running into here is that for many people the government-backed educational loan establishment is not "someone" worthy of any moral consideration, but rather just a poorly-constructed piece of political machinery that only exists because of the failings of the government in regards to public education.
There's another disconnect here: you're treating contracts as a moral imperative, rather than as a civil agreement with failure clauses to be rationally considered. The government does the latter; why should an individual who makes a contract with the government treat it differently?
You mean pay them at all or pay more than minimum payments? I believe the latter but I don’t understand the former (maybe you’re talking about the covid deferments?).
Getting people who are on your program off your program is not how the bureaucrats in charge of these things grow their budgets, get more reports and advance their careers.
SSDI is basically a “disability pension.” The idea is that you are permanently disabled and will never work again.
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%.
Yup, the same thing happens with independent minors in the care of the State - they get a benefit from the state every month but if they have above [a tiny number saved] or earn above [a tiny paycheck every month] the subsidy is reduced, dollar for dollar. It’s an awful system.
If we want to help people, I think the first step is to assign each person/family an advocate. Someone who looks out for the person in need and reaches out to them. That person could help navigate the bureaucracy, explain to people their options, etc.
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.
You mean progressive rather than marginal, but yes.
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.
Yes, there may be situations where certain people need more assistance than others. And it would require a bureaucracy to qualify and whatnot, but that is the same as the situation now. At least with a minimum amount of straight cash to everyone, a significant portion of the population no longer has to jump through hurdles.
“And it would require a bureaucracy to qualify and whatnot, but that is the same as the situation now.”
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.
Yeah, but it won't ever happen because it lays bare the function of taxation as (mostly -- sin taxes and virtue credits being the exception) the vehicle for a wealth transfer from rich to poor. And if we actually admit that then we have to deal with the awkwardness that is why even bother taxing people below the breakeven point?
While I think UBI is an interesting idea, it most certainly is _not_ the only thing to be done; it is not a silver bullet that will solve all problems related to money.
My sister is disabled and has this problem. She has a pile of cash at home as a result of it rather than safe in the bank or in investments. Like, you'd think someone who's paralyzed has a life that's hard enough, but yet we've created infinite hoops for her to jump through still.
As a family member of somebody in that position, I can understand that it's easy to have that kind of emotional perception.
However, as a logical matter, I can see how it is easy to make the exact opposite argument to yours. The government doesn't want to eliminate people who might be viewed as drains of resources. They want votes and voting demographics they can pander to. They want social issues they can shovel more money at and sneak some extra cash to their chosen friends. They want to hire tons of officials to oversee implementations for solutions to increase their fiefdoms and influence. They want a compliant voting block that is depending on them for just enough resources to survive so they'll be less likely to ever be non-compliant with any decrees.
> The government doesn't want to eliminate people who might be viewed as drains of resources. They want votes and voting demographics they can pander to.
Very curious, can you name any politicians that panders to disabled voters?
You’re misreading the post above. They want to be able to say things like “we passed this law to prevent fraud” or “we are tough on crime”. That the actions are counterproductive and hurt those they are meant to help us an externality not a goal.
Your email doesn't appear to be in your profile. Since the presentation out of date, do you have any pointers for where to look for up-to-date information?
Makes sense. You don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you can manufacture support through a thing it’s better to keep the thing around.
> Nope, it’s quite simple. The people in positions of power want her dead & see her as a drain on society no matter what she may bring to it (not that that should matter)
This is exactly how the Conservative party in the UK feel. Every one of their policies oozes this sentiment.
Some people might be shocked by your statements but I’ve dealt with and suffered the policies of the welfare department (DWP). It’s spot on
Hell I bet there's even a sizable number of people who would be Republican's if it weren't for the fact their demographic has been personally victimized by them. Being gay, black, Hispanic, Muslim, but otherwise conservative puts you in such a weird spot.
Their views of what constitutes a family and how immigration should work are both pretty conservative in the traditional sense. Their economic and foreign-policy positions might be a complete nightmare-show.
Reagan threw his full support behind “amnesty” in the 80s.
Bush went out of his way to not let 9/11 be an excuse to target Muslim Americans.
McCain shut down one of his supporters cold when they tried to bring up the conspiracy that Obama was “a secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia Law to the US” and asked him to do his eulogy.
But on the other hand, even Obama didn’t support gay marriage at first.
Wait, what are you saying about Bush? If there's one thing his admin is known for it's targeting Muslim Americans.
But I'll agree, Dems still don't support gay marriage, pregnancy care, trans folks, etc. They just happen to be slightly better about it than Republicans are. Turns out being a minority in America is kinda a bad deal
I thought it was clear from my use of their trademarked term that I am talking about politicians, and I quite obviously am not talking about People Who Vote For Democrats but Do Not Identify As Such.
It's unbelievable how much time, money, and wasted potential productivity the USA spends trying (and failing) to make sure that "undeserving" people don't have access to government welfare benefits of various kinds.
This is the correct framing: we are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year as a country, so long as the framing of that money contains the lie of deservedness.
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.
It’s even worse than you think. The military is constantly trying to close bases and get rid of weapons that aren’t needed to save money. But Congress blocks them at every turn. That’s the whole “government doesn’t create jobs. But don’t take away our make work military jobs.”
The military leaders have also been saying for years that our increase debt is an existential threat.
It's been shocking the amount of "emergency" funding for Ukraine that has been passed in the past 2 months. If it were for anything else other than the military, Republicans would have a gargantuan hissy fit over it and probably filibuster it to death.
And it seems like it accomplishes the exact opposite. I dated a girl who worked in a drug and rehab facility and she'd constantly complain about how the people who actually worked and tried to improve their situations on their own weren't eligible for any help, but there were a set of regulars who were deadbeat losers with no desire to get better who would essentially use the facility as a hotel. I'm not saying the losers shouldn't have access, but having a job should not bar you from getting help.
This is one of the most insidious side effects of means testing. The moment you improve slightly, you cross the threshold and lose the benefits you needed to get established. Which can mean getting a job can worsen your income and quality of life, which is deeply fucked up.
Well said, it's insane the system is so poorly designed, it benefits the type people it's supposed to punish, while hurting the type of people it's supposed to help (according to the reasoning for why we have these laws in place).
Worse than that, we spend it on people with no net worth as opposed to the ppp loans that sent out millions to companies who didnt need it at all. Only accountability for the poor
At this point, not fixing it is indistinguishable from malice. We've known for at least a generation the side effects of means testing. Keeping them around is cruelty.
The amount of fraud against COVID relief programs (e.g. PUA) was pretty staggering. Extensive abuse of welfare programs may be much nearer than we'd like to think.
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.
* 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
not sure where people live, but here in High Cost of Living place, I see more than a few large houses, in the hills, in bad repair, with many vehicles that have blue handicap tags that never move. My outside guess is that someone with a family history of owning property, got a house long, long ago, and rode out three or four decades of outrageous housing price increases while being careful with all the paperwork. Is this common? no. but I tell you with evidence of my own eyes, in more than a few cases, someone has a kind of stability and wealth that healthy, working people just cant seem to ever get here.
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”.
>as you make more money and become more self-sufficient, you lose some of those gains to government policy
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".
> it is a basic income of sorts given to some people who have little or no other income
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?
Its highly inefficient for millions of individuals welfare recipients to being independently purchasing accommodation, entertainment, utilities, food.
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.
Those already exists so presumably that's not what the comment I responded to is referring to, in addition it was put in opposition to welfare recipients having the ability to choose how they spend what they receive so there is no equivalency.
$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 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.
I genuinely feel like the way a lot of government programs are designed, they actively discourage being responsible.
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.
Means testing (making sure benefits only go to poor folks) is such a colossal waste of time and money. And it creates perverse incentives where becoming slightly less poor can lead to a huge drop in benefits.
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.
I never understood why these thresholds are hard thresholds in the first place. It should make sense for the reduction in benifits to reduce gradually but it's pretty rare to see a policy like that
I learned this first hand when my family member started receiving SSI, and they said the government check your bank account to see if you have too much money. As a result, you see a line of elderly line up at local banks when it's payday, to withdraw the money out as cash and to keep the bank account balance as low as possible.
this is really tough for people with disabilities, since a lot more stuff then depends on medicaid. An easy example, if you qualify for medicaid then you qualified for the emergency broadband benefit, which was good for 50/month off internet. Or more complex, you get a budget to spend on home health care workers, transportation, respite care, therapeutic activities, etc., go over and you lose thousands of dollars of services necessary to live. thats even ignoring the actual medical benefits of medicaid
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.
> And the threshold for it (SSA calls it “income disregards”) is so astonishingly low that I asked Ne’eman about it. He believes the number is a holdover from at least 1972, when SSI was created. SSI borrowed some of its numbers from a previous aid program for the blind, and didn’t index them for inflation. Fifty years later, they remain the same, despite a sevenfold increase in the consumer price index.
I haven't found concrete history here, but as far as I can tell, the income limit may have made sense in 1935.
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).
They make sense to the voters. People are actually strongly in favor of reducing them further, despite the already-obscene nature of the system.
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.
As the article states, there are phaseouts in many of the programs involved. SSI does have an income-based phaseout, not a complete threshold - the $2k threshold is a wealth cap, there is a phaseout-based income cap as well.
> 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.
You can't do that. It's important to redistribute inflation every year in the budget so that you explicitly "help" your target demography and newspapers can write about that. /cynical
When the bill was written, $1500 (the max benefit at the time) was about $8900. Not too shabby. Seems like not linking it to inflation was an oversight.
"Homeless and poor people are so lazy and irresponsible with their money, they can't save it and invest it like smart and noble rich people. But also they save too much money and are cheating the system when they need assistance despite basic necessities being made as difficult and expensive to obtain as possible!" /s
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.
My brother is on disability, and has an ABLE account so that my family can give him some money above the disability funds.
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.
Blind person here; I'm not on SSDI myself, but I have friends who are. All this policy seems to encourage is financial crimes, bordering on money laundering. It seems like everybody is doing it, or at least everybody who I've talked to. I've seen everything, from very careful financial planning, including buying things and paying bills a lot earlier than needed in anticipation of large influxes of money, to withdrawing money in cash, which is easy to hide and easy to justify to a government official, to putting money in weird accounts which the IRS is unlikely to audit. I'm sure people who actually live in the US have seen a lot more examples of this than I have.
People have no idea. I've done Darpa internships in IT and full stack developer internships in DC, and could have a lucrative career someday, but I'm stuck in this strange pocket of SSDI where I can't afford to return to work for less than $70k and I'm not yet worth that much.
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.
I went to a special high school for kids with autistic spectrum disorder and we were basically all educated and given assistance for during transition to graduation getting SSI immediately.
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.
Disability benefits in the US is so absurd. I would characterize it as all or nothing. They often completely ignore people with “marginal” disabilities but if you are rich enough to afford a good lawyer, you guessed it, you can qualify for all these programs. Once you see it you can’t unsee how inefficient these programs are. There’s an entire industry designed to exploit government resources.
Know a number of folks on SSI. Yup. This is real. One person I know keeps cash, when their account gets too high. That’s not so safe, as folks on SSI are often living in less-than-wonderful environments.
Also, people who take Social Security early, are prohibited from earning over a certain amount, but I think that’s different.
I live in france, and a few "counties" (départements) implemented such thing, at a higher amount (about 20k), but for welfare recipients. The amount is about 500 euros per month.
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.
I just got Kicked off of SSDI(I also revived SSI because my SSDI income was below 75% of the poverty level) but I plan to appeal but that $2000 dollar asset limit last set in 1987-1989 and never indexed to inflation is just too draconian and needs to be recalculated for 2022 dollars and actually Indexed to the inflation rate.
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.
This is how it works in Sweden as well for försörjningsstöd, which is something you can get if you have no income and you actively look for work. However, if you’re disabled, I’m pretty sure other rules apply.
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!
Here I was feeling bad that a feature I designed and released had some edge cases around a small browser feature I hadn't fully considered.
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.
This is a horrible policy, but it seems there is a possible solution (for people with good enough credit, which means the most vulnerable people cannot do this):
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
I've never been able to get a mortgage while on SSDI. It's theoretically possible. I do have credit cards and a car payment though, so access to credit isn't entirely non-existant. I'd love to get qualified for USDA loan. Seems like a pipedream though.
I actually faced this while researching how to aid a family member under the representative payee program and began to wonder how to spend their funds in ways that would benefit them and avoid accumulation of assets and all that stuff to remain below 2k.
https://www.ssa.gov/payee/faqrep.htm
This was intended for the destitute to cover month to month expenses. It’s not designed for people with even modest means as an extra nest egg. And the host of ways to gather disability money really blows the mind.
SSA’s next biggest job after doling out cash is to watch for waste, fraud, and abuse.
You can go read reports from the OG sociologists and they're talking about how people in the projects have all sorts of cash income so they don't lose their bennies and the gangs tax the cash. That was 60yr ago.
Can confirm from second-hand experience that this is a very real problem.
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.
Yes, this has been a problem for many years. I used to be a legal aid lawyer, and one often heard about people having to get rid of assets to qualify for life-sustaining benefits.
this whole discussion reminds me of the [Speerhamland system in England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system), which was supposed to guarantee everyone enough to eat, but because it made up the difference between the employer's pay and the speerhamland rate with government funds, it effectively created a maximum wage in the countryside.
I say this is the most deranged take on this possible, but then again, humanity tends to surprise me.
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?
UBI is always going to have a de facto cutoff where some people pay more in tax than they receive in UBI (unless your government is funding it solely by money printing or having massive amounts of oil per head of population).
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.
UBI is always going to have a de facto cutoff where some people pay more in tax than they receive in UBI
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.
> 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.
A smooth transition out is more or less by definition not a cutoff (a cutoff being a sudden thing). This is an important distinction, because it means it's never harmful to earn another dollar.
Since we don't have a wealth tax, there isn't even a smooth transition out along the dimension that the article discusses.
The article also discusses and criticises a 50% effective marginal tax on working which is absolutely how an UBI smoothly transitions if funded by an income tax, and in theory the taper could be steeper still. Not harmful to earn another dollar, but not especially lucrative either.
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.
If UBI could logically evolve into non-universal basic income, that should be a concern, because if people are dependent on that money, they can't really oppose the change.
Not quite. I'm concerned that they would offer UBI, and then add conditions later. It's pedantic to think that officials would care that this is "not technically UBI anymore." It would be called UBI, but you would be required to comply with different standards to receive it.
Hum... If you are saying that people shouldn't willingly depend on social assistance, I don't think you will find anybody to disagree with.
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.
If you're referring to the issue with inflation over time making old policy numbers no longer make sense, it could definitely happen, though I think most UBI proponents prefer a design that automatically adjusts for inflation for exactly this reason. But if you're referring to the part where onerous means testing and other eligibility rules make life harder for the very people we want to help, then no, I think one of the fundamental benefits of a UBI is that it avoids all of that.
I'm not asking about the extreme mischaracterization of my position of "literally anything." I'm asking what safeguards are in place to keep UBI, as we know the term, from evolving into UBI-asterisk, with conditions on the recipients.
So far the strongest counter argument I have seen is "well then it wouldn't technically be UBI", which doesn't fix anything.
Without a constitutional amendment there’s no guarantee of anything, future congress being bound by past congress is a fundamentally terrible idea. Imagine what the slaveholders in the early 1800s would have tried to do if they could have passed a “slaves forever and nobody can ever change this law” bill (which indeed was what the confederacy tried to do with its constitution).
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've considered it. I'm Jewish and qualify for Israeli citizenship, and theoretically I could keep SSDI while living abroad. I'd prefer Spain though honestly. There's a Puerto Rico loophole that allows US citizens to move there under their former colonies program. You just have to learn Spanish and live in PR for a year before applying.
Your comment seems to me somewhat unsubstantiated declaraction of stereotypical evil. That is, it isn't really saying anything we haven't already heard a lot, nor providing any additional context nor basis for it.
Complaing about downvotes is among the surest ways to accumulate more downvotes, on HN. It's explicitly discouraged by the guidelines [0]:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
As someone with a close friend who has a childhood disability, the parent poster is pretty on the money. It does seem to depend which state you're in, because disability is administered by the state. Deep red states tend to make it miserable to work with them so people will just give up. I've heard so many stories of disabled people getting yelled at and told they're faking their very real conditions. It's disgusting.
"you're just saying people are evil!" is a rather banal dodge of the entire thesis of the article, that the system is indeed ineffective and cruel. It's using rules-lawyerism to suppress a point that you find too uncomfortable to address with an actual argument.
Frankly this is sort of a recurring theme on HN, where people tend to lapse into meta-argument or tone argument as a substitute for substantive discussion. It's a matter of degree but at some point these tactics do become a logical fallacy, it's a very enticing way to shut down an argument that you can't directly counter.
Can I make the presumption that you’re not somebody with a significant disability & also don’t regularly find themselves talking at length with quite an amount of others in the disabled/disability support community? My deepest apologies if I’m incorrect about that, but it’s hard for me to imagine that coming out of one who is/does.
& yes, typically I’m not one to go “muh downvotes” but there is something quite unironically hilarious about speaking up about the disabled from a position of decade+ experience & then being downvoted to invisibility without a singular reply on a hyper-capitalist forum.
Btw. If you feel it’s unsubstantiated, please perhaps try reading the title of the article we’re commenting about…
So much entitlement. You want the free money, there are rules. The 2000 dollar limit is perhaps too low--so that's something that can be adjusted--but the whole point of SSI is for low income disabled people. That's the point. SSDI is a different but similar program without that 2000 dollar limit.
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.
The entitlement? Humans should be entitled to a life free of material suffering. Otherwise what is the point of creating governments and corporations if not to improve our quality of life. If you think the most vulnerable in society wanting help is entitlement then I suggest you stop using roads or visiting hospitals.
Is this the “poor people aren’t poor because they have refrigerators” 2.0 argument?
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.
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?
What it means practically is the basics like food, shelter, and healthcare. Beyond those basic needs, free education and basic financial security (no means testing or savings limit like for the example in the original post)
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 would just like to point out that a recession is a prime example of why most of our current "scarcity" is artificial. In a recession workers are still present and physical capital is still present. The raw materials are still present and the mechanisms of government are still present. The problems lie with the financial system that facilitates exchange. A recession is not caused by "not enough resources" it's the aftermath of people taking too many risks with fake paper money. It's a non-sequitur to imply that a recession means that the government cant take care of its citizens.
Since expansion (often into areas that don’t work) and corresponding contractions (when that which doesn’t work is found and then stops as it becomes unsustainable) happens in every system humans have ever tried that I’m aware of, what do you think is the alternative?
I don't think there is an alternative to free markets, but I do believe that we can use the power of government to set price floors. For example let's say the government provides free housing for all citizens regardless of means testing. It doesn't have to be great housing, but it establishes a price floor that all landlords have to compete with by offering better housing or lowering their rents. No fear of homelessness, starvation, or death by uninsured illness also establishes a labor floor. People can take more time for a job search, or quit jobs that are exploitative/pay poorly. The government doesn't have to mandate a minimum wage, since jobs now must offer something more than a day-to-day subsistence. With advances in productivity we are more than capable of doing this but we allocate capital to other things in pursuit of profit. Think of how much capital was poured into web3 speculation that could have been used to actually establish a price floor for housing or a wage floor for labor.
Why would a landlord participate, or instead move to a more profitable outlet for their effort and capital? If even after that there isn’t enough housing (say it’s a desirable area so people want to move in), who is going to build it?
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.
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.
The free housing I am referring to is housing built and owned by the government. Landlords are participating in the market because they have to rent apartments to make money. Look at Vienna's housing model if you want to see a successful example of this.
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.
Ah, but have you lived in a government housing project before?
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?
My mother lived in section 8 for a few years, although her housing was rural and fairly nice-- not so much in urban areas. Most of the things you listed I am against, I am against means testing and strict requirements for tenants. If someone wants to shoot up heroin in their section 8 I'd prefer them doing it there than out in the street. It has also been shown multiple times that housing the homeless actually saves taxpayers money:
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.
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.
Glad it’s working for them - Singapore uses a similar model (MDB).
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.
> Roads and hospitals are paid for by taxes, usually paid by the people using them.
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.
Lot's of disabled people have medical bills in the 10s of thousands. If you have a cutoff below that amount, it makes it so that they can't afford to not be poor which is a shit deal for everyone.
Not just medical bills -- even routine expenses (like paying rent, getting a car repaired, or replacing a household appliance) can easily run over the $2000 limit. People with disabilities shouldn't have to go out of their way to avoid having money.
Seen this kind of thing several times.
"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.
I am in the process of applying for SSDI right now. AMAA, I suppose.
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.
Fraud paranoia seems to keep constant downward pressure on our social safety net. We'd rather scrap a life-saving system than accept a minimal level of fraud. Just imagine if retail businesses operated this way and shut down at the first sign of shoplifting. Instead, they mitigate where possible and treat the result as a cost-of-doing-business.
I'm pretty sure means tested welfare is specifically intended to be difficult and unpopular. If it was conceived and implemented well then it might just become a popular policy! And then that ofc slippery slopes into the US becoming a welfare state where no one wants to work (in the minds of some elites).
It’s becoming exactly the same story in the UK under the conservative government, people with lifelong disabilities forced to be assessed regularly to prove their legs or arms haven’t grown back or they haven’t grown out of their cerebral palsy etc.
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.
One solution to this is to have fixed size budgets for assistance programs. Eg. Each week 1% of GDP will be spent on XYZ assistance program.
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.
I assisted someone in the process to receive SSDI and it was the most kafkaesque process I've ever experienced. I think every individual person at the SSA involved in the case was trying their best, but it really feels like the organization functions in a way to prevent as many people as possible from getting the benefits they qualify for.
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.
'The entire process is wrapped in layers of fraud paranoia, even though the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule.'
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?
Having been through the process myself, remember to keep your self worth guarded against the summation of what they conclude you're capable of. If you make it to a hearing a judge will gavel your disability into legality after a jury of doctors and vocational experts read your verdict. You seem like a good person and these experiences shouldn't take away from that. Thanks for putting yourself out there.
>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?
From my experience, it seems the fraud paranoia actually trends towards increasing the relative fraud rate. The layers of bullshit serve to trip up and exclude those the programs are meant to serve but don’t bother the fraudsters at all. Layers of bureaucracy don’t hurt people who are willing to just lie - it’s like why dishonest witnesses are often more compelling. It’s much easier to tell an internally consistent story when it’s all fabricated.
Of course; I’m sure that, if it were easy enough, people would commit social security fraud.
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 apologize; it was a little glib. I'm sure that the way it works isn't Pareto optimal; and there is clearly a problem in the U.S. of using shaming as a tool to discourage consumption of means-tested benefits, as opposed to focusing on actual good governance.
I wish you the best of luck.
No worries! You’re not out of line for being concerned about this stuff.
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. :-)
Once a little fraud is possible an industry is set up to exploit it until it becomes dominated by fraud.
It would be possible to change policies slightly and observe the results. The slope toward vastly less punitive benefits regimes might be slippery...
That would explain the opposite situation when it comes to tax avoidance schemes.
Yes; in fact, there's excellent evidence from the IRS that the level of misreporting on tax returns increases with the opacity and difficulty of verification of income source. There's hardly any fraud for W-2 employees, and relatively large amounts of it for passthrough businesses like partnership and S-corps.
That’s something we could calculate, so any discussion about it is a deflection.
The piece of advice I can give you is: Get an attorney! It will only cost you 30% of your SSDI benefits for the first year, capped at $6,000. It's well worth the cost.
This right here. People claim tax law is bad but disability law is almost as bad in that no reasonable person could be expected to know all the details in the laws.
Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.
Since we can ask you anything: If you're comfortable with sharing, what about your disability makes it difficult to do a tech job?
Sure. In 2017 I started getting head-splitting migraines.
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.
Thanks for sharing and sorry to hear about that. I can relate a little to the migraines. I had some blinding migraines come on quickly a few years ago, but then leave just as quickly. The pain was so intense I could barely think straight during those periods. Thankfully they disappeared. Similarly, I had some head x-rays that yielded nothing out of the ordinary.
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
Honestly, part of it is that it’s not even fair for me to present myself as “able to work” right now.
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.
I most recently saw that with some criticisms of Section 8 housing.
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
> 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.
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.
You typically need ~3 months of rent on hand to get a new apartment. That can be a really large amount of money for people on assistance
There are month to month rentals available today that don't require the down payment requirements of a year lease.
A mini rant - short term residential rentals are the housing equivalent of payday lending in finance - a market that exists by extorting impoverished people.
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.
Wow you mean to say you don't get a discount when you pay month to month over a year long commitment? Pretty much everything is like that including virtually all SaaS pricing models.
How long should one rent for in this hypothetical situation?
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?
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
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 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.
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 don't think PragmaticPulp is saying anything about requiring people to rent before getting a house. Just that the purpose of section 8 housing is to help people who can't afford rents. If someone is saving for a house, I think that's a sign that that person can afford rents, and therefore isn't the target for section 8 housing.
If the government is going to pay or subsidize rent for someone, I’m ok with there being a requirement that such support is needed by that recipient.
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.
How long are the people paying their own way renting?
Eh. Why should the jump from Section 8 (subsidized rent) be straight to home ownership (and not renting with your own income)?
Section 8 might have some inefficient cliffs. But not allowing savings for a mortgage doesn’t strike me as one of them.
I agree that not allowing savings for a mortgage probably isn't a huge issue in practice, but discouraging saving in general is completely bonkers policy.
Oh, I agree. Savings of some form should be encouraged. Various cliffs are bad policy.
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.
What's this business with "should"?
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.
> If someone can find a path to jump from dependency to ownership, why "should" aid programs be structured to prevent that?
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.
Renting is supposed to be a much shorter commitment that lets people move around. It shouldn’t be cheaper in a market that’s allowed to function. If anything, the optionality and added risk should have a cost, which is also why a hotel room costs more per day or week than renting.
> It shouldn’t be cheaper in a market that’s allowed to function.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Because the next step from subsidized housing is to renting.
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?
If you’re earning a living wage, you don’t need government assistance to avoid homelessness.
If you started earning a living wage this month, kicking you out of your current home immediately isn't going to make it easy to keep it.
I’m not sure what that has to do with Section 8 recipients buying homes?
Believe me, folks don't want to live in subsidized housing, it generally sucks.
> Going straight from subsidized rental housing to home ownership doesn’t make sense
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.
Right? We never means test anything when it comes to wealthy incentives / programs.
Isn't there just an element of basic fairness to this? The budget for Section 8 is only so much, and people who can afford market rent need to be moving out of the program to make way for others.
If you care about people not ending up on the same program again, shoving them out the door the second they can nominally pay full price themselves doesn't help,
I agree, however, there needs to be some sort of means test and phase-out. It’s equally absurd that somebody receiving Section 8 benefits should be able to save at a higher rate than somebody just outside the benefit range (and saving at a rate that buys a house above and beyond a reasonable emergency fund likely does that).
Phase-out is the key that's missing from so many assistance programs. It's the same with Medicaid, which really discourages you from taking that next step up to a slightly better-paying job, especially if you have a chronic health condition.
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.
SSI already has an income phase-out (not a cliff), as discussed in the article. The problem is the phase-out starts at $85 (!) and benefits steeply decline once you are in the phase-out, not that there isn’t a phase-out at all.
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 mean it’s all about fairness. Even animals and babies understand the concept of unequal distribution of community resources.
This is such a strange take.
How do? Allowing recipients of public assistance to accumulate more savings than those just outside the program would be a perverse incentive to join the program.
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.
why should you be forced to rent for a place to sleep?
The only way is to put savings under your mattress and that is extremely likely to get stolen (usually by relatives or "friends"). It's an awful catch 22.
Or when you need to use that money by the police as part of Civil Asset Forfeiture during a random stop/search.
Get a safety deposit box for $80 a year and store your cash in it.
They're not easy to find. I got a notice last month from my credit union that I need to plan move my stuff out of my deposit box.
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.
Or NFTs ;)
Are you sure it was section 8?
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.
I may have remembered incorrectly but I believe it was in the context of the New York Housing Authority and I just made the perhaps incorrect assumption that it was Section 8. I tried to find the article itself but couldn't find it quickly.
You pay a penalty on household income over x. But then get family of 4 making 500k a year and since the children don’t file or own other investments.
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.
You folks managing Privately Run for Profit/Non Profit Section 8 housing units management firms are just derelict in your Duty as the US Government/FCC has billions of dollars of Funding Made available for High Speed Internet assistance for the poor but the Privately Run Section 8 housing entities(For Profit or Non Profit) are not even applying for the funds because they are too cheap to hire Grant Writers to apply for the funding.
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.
Too late to edit, but I think this was actually in the context of New York City Housing Authority and not Section 8. I tried to track down the article but couldn't find it quickly.
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.
a quick search on google seems to say that theres no asset check for section 8, just income checks(including interest/etc from assets)
When I was a student and wanted to get a small job to get some pocket money, I couldn't, because after reporting it, my mom would lose some family benefits and we'd be worse off at the end of the day. This was a recurring theme until I graduated and went on my own.
It's amazing how many people see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, and then turn around and claim that everything will be better when the government runs everything in the economy.
It’s amazing how people could see this happening, acknowledge it is wrong and severely dysfunctional, then go around insisting we add more means testing to benefits because it would be horrible if people got help who “didn’t deserve it”.
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.
Very snarky response. I think the poster you replied to was trying to point out that the reason this happens is because the government prints money and if they don't take the money out of circulation via taxes then inflation becomes an issue.
This is the one-two punch that Republicans use to kill social programs.
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.
I mean, I get it that the Republicans like to destroy this shit.
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.
Democrats have had the power to pass legislation without Republican support during the following periods:
* 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
> 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.
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.)
Even amongst the left, the narrative of the welfare queen is strong. Eliminating means testing is so easily attacked that it is a challenging policy to propose.
This isn't to let the Democrats off the hook, only to explain that Democratic voters are not uniformly behind improving these policies.
By the standards of the rest of the world, the US Democrats are centre-right and American politics have no left. It’s really astonishing how different the Overton window is (and concerning how much my home country is importing US politics.
By a European standard they're not even center-right.
Yeah, the Democrats are right wing. You're confounding left and Democrats.
The overton window has shifted so far right that some people think Biden is a socialist.
The Overton window as already there when people were calling Obama, of all people, a Marxist.
The answer is actually quite simple.
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.
> The democrat-voting population is farther left than the democrat politicians.
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 feel like this is a popular cop out answer, that while likely having some degree of truth, over-simplifies the issues in government.
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.
How exactly does someone like Jeff Bezos benefit from a welfare system that is both inefficient and costly? If politicians are really so easily "bought" by the wealthy, then we'd see more legislation that wealthy people care about, but we don't even see that either. Oracle v. Google and net neutrality end up being decided by the unelected officials because Congress refuses to do anything, but virtue signal all day. Bernie actually tries to pass real legislation, but all this new wave of politicians including AOC cares about is seeking more political power. Every bill she sponsors looks like they're designed to not get passed but rile up her base.
If the Democratic Party-voting population was really that much farther left than the Democratic Party politicians, then you'd really expect that farther left candidates would be winning primaries, wouldn't you?
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.
This isn't really the gotcha moment you think it is. Primaries are, well, mostly a farce and the people that show up for the primaries are the ones that often have the most free time or ability to do so. Retirees, wealthier individuals and so forth. There's no better evidence of this fact than candidates like Bernie Sanders having extremely high popularity among the younger generation which tapers off the older people get. There's a massive and growing generational divide that's only going to get better once the voting block that enables them starts dying off.
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.
Shrug. The world belongs to those who show up.
The far left stays home because the democrats don't represent their views.
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.
The media told people that Bernie Sanders was unelectable, so people voted for Biden.
OK; but no-one's even slightly suggesting that (insert any Democratic candidate's name here) is in danger of losing a race for a NY Senate seat, and that particular post has given us Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.
> This is the one-two punch that Republicans use to kill social programs.
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.
Which social programs have the Republicans killed?
And yet, when the Democrats control Congress and the presidency (like they do now, like they did in 2010), they do absolutely nothing to show us how wonderful their programs could be -- if only they had control!
Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.
They don't actually have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support though. Outside of budget reconciliation, neither party has had the power to pass legislation without at least some bipartisan support since Ted Kennedy was replaced in 2010.
They do have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support, actually. They can pass a separate bill to suspend the filibuster on another bill, and suspending the filibuster only requires the 50 Democrat Senators and the VP.
They tried to do so in January but Manchin and Sinema voted against it.
So, they don't have the ability to pass general bills without Republican support. They'd need to change the rules to have that ability.
What a silly distinction. The rules aren't an actual obstacle; they can change the rules whenever they want, if all 50 Dem senators agree.
In fact they've already done so at least once:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/585192-senate-passes-bil...
There's nothing stopping the single party wealthy states like CA and NY implementing whatever they want. Just raise taxes on the rich and do whatever you want with their money, right?
It's happening mostly because the politicians advocating for these dysfunctional policies are ignorants corrupted by their business friends who really don't want people to feel safe enough to ask for more money.
At least here in Europe. Speaking from experience.
We have several people directly profiting from several ineffective policies targeting disadvantaged in the local Parliament.
How would you solve this without the government? I can't see why private companies would be incentivized to do this. And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem.
>And the reason this is dysfunctional is because the government doesn't go far enough in extending benefits. If there was more budget allocated to these benefits then we wouldn't have this problem.
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.
Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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.
Also being locked away in overcrowded sanitariums.
I have definitely glossed over a lot of horrors when writing the above.
> 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"
"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.
>"Expanding welfare programs = more control" is some tinfoil hat thinking.
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?
No, they weren’t. You’re dreaming about a time that never existed, or where it did exist was completely incapable of scaling and weathering economic downturns. It’s a common conservative narrative, but it simply isn’t based on reality.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-con...
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/...
>You’re dreaming about a time that never existed, or where it did exist was completely incapable of scaling and weathering economic downturns.
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.
> Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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?
Charitable programs in places of worship existed long before government programs. These are communities of people giving their time, money, and resources, and are actually invested in the people they are helping. If you don't believe they ever helped anyone, then we fundamentally disagree on historical facts.
Literally nobody is disputing that charities in places of worship "ever helped anyone". What's in dispute is whether they would have sufficient resources and the will to help everyone.
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...
Please assume I'm a reasonable person enough to not say that nobody has ever received help, and see the context as to what I meant - that many people do not receive enough help.
Exactly what time period in what part of the world are you thinking of? If you go back too far, you'll hit a time when places of worship were the government, or at least so entangled in it as to make no difference. If you don't go back far enough, you'll hit a time when work houses and sanitariums were commonplace, which might be inhumane by modern standards, but definitely count as "government programs to help the poor."
Those charitable programs exist now. There's nothing stopping them from existing. So why does the problem still exist then? And more importantly: Why have other countries solved this in a far better manner than the US?
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.
> If you don't believe they ever helped anyone
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.
> Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
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?
There was some charitable support at times in history.
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.
>except the countless hours my parents have spent helping her.
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.
So I take it that you host a disabled person in your home, then?
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.
My favorite one is the process of moving between states on medicaid.
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.
We may be hosting my partner's aunt or grandmother soon, since they will likely have nobody closer to look after them. Did I pass your "is a good person" test?
OK, topic shift.
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.
> the further we replace the spirit of charity with an impersonal, dysfunctional system of coercion
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.
>First, taxation-based disability support is "spirit of charity" at scale.
I invite you to not pay your taxes and watch what happens.
As an individual? I would be coerced to do so - as it should be.
As a society? Societies are perfectly free to decide to stop taxation.
"Society" is not some autonomous external being that is free to do how it pleases. It is composed of individuals making decisions. If the decisions of the individuals are coerced, then the society's aggregate behavior is coerced.
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.
Nice trolling.
> Wouldn't you be happy if more people were like your parents?
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.
> If there were "expensive doctors" who felt in their hearts the need to help your aunt, free of charge?
Hard to do when malpractice lawsuits are a thing.
Good thing healthcare professionals have malpractice insurance?
I am disabled and applying for SSDI right now.
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!
How many places of worship have you visited and asked?
Lol. I’ve seen the most absolutely down & out “good” people who’ve eventually ended up at places of worship begging.
They get disgusting looks & “we’ll pray for your soul” (saying it as if they believe it’s already been damned to hell)
How did you get such access to first hand knowledge of multiple peoples experiences at different places of worship?
Niche subreddits for medical conditions I can’t imagine anybody would spend the time of their days LARPing in, my own medical groups in which people tend to also face severe financial issues for a variety of reasons with ~30k combined people & ~5k active
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)
I said "first hand" experience intentionally, and the reason is because the content that you're reading is going to be biased towards the people writing it. Just like anyone who is recollecting a bad situation and outcome, they are going to leave things out, misrepresent what was said, and sometimes straight up lie to take any blame off of themselves. They're not LARPing so much as they're extremely biased about what happened. I grew up in a Christian school, attending multiple churches, and I have NEVER once seen someone turned away in the way that you describe. Does that mean it doesn't happen? No, there are shitty people everywhere. But these places are known for bending over backwards to help vulnerable people, at least that has been my first hand experience.
> Do you believe people never received help before the government came along?
Prior to such programs, level of help was far more variable and often dependent mostly on family.
Local charities don't even fully cover the holes in the existing welfare system. Why would you expect them to be able to bear the full burden in its stead?
I don't think people are arguing for no government assistance program, they're observing that it's incentivizing staying in the program rather than the assumed intended use, helping someone get on their feet again
Welfare policies don't have to be stupid, now do they?
Sometimes it's not even about budget.
I've seen clerks actively discourage people from asking for the benefits even before the official evaluation.
Well, it is the government that’s providing the help in the first place.
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.
The alternative is worse. My aunt is on disability. Yes, systems suck and if she could hold a temp job she'd be discouraged from doing so.
She'd be dead in the ground if conservative policies ran everything.
Sounds like you are pro-immortality!
It's not the fault of government per se, but puritanical conservatives in government who think any assistance to disadvantaged people is coddling lazy slackers.
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.
As I get older I see more and more of “reducing gov’t waste” as a means to funnel money into private individuals’ pockets. See also for-profit prisons, charter schools, bussing, medical care, etc etc.
And yet, some countries and cultures have safety nets that work.
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.
> And yet, some countries and cultures have safety nets that work.
Welfare traps are definitely a thing in countries and cultures with “safety nets that works”, fwiw.
“For decades most airplane crashes have been caused by trained pilots and yet we continue to put trained pilots in the cockpit.” This form of argument almost looks compelling until you realize that it is predicated on some unspoken belief that there is a clear better alternative.
Aren't most of these absurd rules the result of elected legislators putting on a show for their voters rather than the result of professional beurocrats making arbitrary rules because they felt like it?
It's the politicians with your antigovernment attitude that make these programs so awful. Then they turn around and point at the mess they helped create as the reason they're antigovernment.
It’s easy to pass blame; harder to realize that we are the people who are supposed to fix it.
These kind of labyrinthine policies happen because they're attempts to appease people who don't want these programs to exist at all.
Yup. People complain about freeloaders taking advantage of these systems so they demand policies like this.
Yep. Shut down the whole system because there are some people who might cheat on it.
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.
And even if people aren't cheating it, just make up stories about people doing to so to justify shutting it down! The "welfare queen" archetype is so strong in the minds of people in this country that it prevents all sorts of useful policy.
Do economists and politologist not acknowledge the problem?
We want to help people who don’t make a lot of money. Governments are imperfect institutions yes, but what alternative is there to send money to people who need it ?
> "Assistance" programs meant to prop people up with so many reporting requirements and perverse incentives that punish you for improving your situation...
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.
There is not fine line we are just flat out dumber than rocks. Its incredibly simple in fact. Lets talk about subject of the article disability income.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Nope. This makes no sense. You're replacing their income because they can't generating any. That's it.
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.
> 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.
Fair. But I'm resentful of the big fraudsters like Rick Scott.
> 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.
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?
Insurance in the US is often private. Private insurance companies push pretty hard to not pay for things that people don't need (to the point of sometimes not paying for things that people do need, but that's a different topic).
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.
I'd use the same idea in the justice system, where the presumption of innocence is paramount, and apply it here. It's better to let 9 criminals go free, than to jail 1 innocent person by accident, and it is better to assist 9 extra people in need, than to let one person in need to not get it due to the rules.
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.
It's actually super easy to do. See, you just...make sure that rather than cliffs, you have percentage based reduction of benefits. I.e., you lose $1 of benefit for every $2 you make, or whatever. And something similar with assets (though admittedly the details would be trickier to avoid it being gamed).
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.
As discussed elsewhere in the comments here, and as discussed in the article, there is indeed a phaseout for income. Every $1 you make above $85 reduces your benefits by $0.50, so they are doing exactly what you suggest.
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.
Not for SSDI. There’s a strict cutoff that’s adjusted every year. This year it’s $1350 — if you make more than $1350 any given month, you do not receive benefits for that month.
From my post - 'And something similar with assets (though admittedly the details would be trickier to avoid it being gamed).'
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.
I don't know why you'd have any wealth cutoff. This is a replacement for their income because they can't make any income due to disability. What business does anyone have dictating anything else about their life. None. That's very authoritarian.
One issue if that if you have multiple benefits, and each phases out over a similar range, the combined total loss can be over 100%.
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.
Oh, agreed; it's why I don't call out specific benefits (since I know they have different rules and such). My intention there is to generalize to all of them.
> It's actually super easy to do. See, you just...make sure that rather than cliffs, you have percentage based reduction of benefits.
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.)
I filed for unemployment for a few months during the pandemic (film industry. Literally no work available). The most insane revelation, as this was my first time filing, was that I had to file every single week. All for a paltry $247/wk (without the federal addition during Covid).
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.
Just think of the folks in your local Theater/Trade Show Union branch and the Broadway season ends and the slow summer months begins where at the same time the Trade Show season is at its low point(Summer Months), And UI insurance is sometimes the only way to make it through the Summer Months In the Big Easy and for Union members that are not high up on the Seniority roster. You are Studio Mechanics/Related Local folks and if you can get some Movie/TV production work over the summer you have it good there as after summer is over you can go over to the Theater/Trade Show local in the non summer months and get some extra work there.
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.
It doesn't even have to be the case that, as you say, "it is more expensive to earn any income than it is to earn none". That describes an implicit tax rate of >100% which would certainly discourage work, but even if it were, say, 75%, I don't think you have to be a hard-core republican to believe that that might disincentivize work and be on the far side of the Laffer curve.
If you consider the (conditional) basic income in Germany ("Grundsicherung") as given, and it's partial reduction in the face of more than 100€/month income as income tax, one reaches the asymptotic effective (average, not marginal) tax rate of the super-rich at about 180~200€/month. It's progressive until around 1500€/month of income (if it was salary), after which it's regressive.
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)).
I always have to ask: How does UBI not just result in inflation and we end up in the exact same situation as we are in now but with extra steps?
If UBI is paid out through printing extra currency, it will induce inflation.
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.
Thanks. That makes sense.
UBI is a pretty small money faucet compared to the endless spending on foreign wars that the US political establishment regularly undertakes. Just give out the same amount of money to poor people instead of using it as a middle-class jobs program that kills foreigners.
This is what many low income buildings become. They take 30% of your gross income so any small raise get's immediately reduced by half and sucked into the machine. Unless you can get a huge salary increase above the average wage you can never save enough to move into a property outside of the system even after your rent reaches parity with average rent prices. The only thing one can do is to quit working legally which reduces the rent and frees you up to find cash work.
That's way less of a problem. It's not great when half a raise goes to rent and half goes into your pocket, but it doesn't hold a candle to policies where the entire raise disappears or you actually end up with less money.
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.
this is way worse. medical expenses for disabled people are high enough that this takes over 100% for a lot of jobs
As a resident this is absolutely the least of the difficulties in such buildings.
When I went to Europe backpacking the rude shocker was waking up in the middle of the night because that seat was not reserved. I thought that train only had unreserved seats. From next day I started adding reservation with that extra cost every time I had to reserve seats or berths and then seeing a lot of Europe essentially had just buses as public transports and not trains (esp. when I moved towards Eastern Europe -- also in Sarajevo I believe the pass didn't work, I had bought that in AMS).
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?
You're talking about the welfare trap. That's not what the article is about. The article is about disabled people who are unable to work being kept poor. Many people will never work because they can't and this punishes all of them.
We also have a crazy system where a graduate is a fool to pay back the education loans.
What do you mean? People who don’t pay their student loans face all kinds of negative consequences from being unable to buy a home / car due to credit dings, tax refund garnishment & wage garnishment on top of fees & interest
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2022/05/19/if-biden-...
If you believe there's a meaningful likelihood of that happening any time soon, then sure, you might consider stopping payments for some short period of time to see if it plays out. But that's hardly what I would call "a crazy system where a graduate is a fool to pay back the education loans."
I don’t understand your point. if you’re saying it would be wise to take advantage of current 0% interest and/or deferment policies to pay as little as possible until it’s clearer whether or not any kind of loan forgiveness will happen, then sure. not paying at all is really not an option over the long term.
I am not optimistic that Biden will attempt to use executive powers to make any broad student loan cancelations.
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.
Why would someone be a fool to pay? Biden was previously advocating for only $10k which doesn't cover the median federal student loan amount. $50k may not even happen. Right now you can pay down some of the principle at 0% interest in case your loans aren't forgiven.
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.
If you pay back your loans responsibly, and another doesn't and gets their balance forgiven, who's the fool?
> 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.
I think the basic disconnect you're running into here is that for many people the government-backed educational loan establishment is not "someone" worthy of any moral consideration, but rather just a poorly-constructed piece of political machinery that only exists because of the failings of the government in regards to public education.
Every person with a loan got it of their own free will and signed a contract asserting of their own free will that they were going to pay it back.
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".
There's another disconnect here: you're treating contracts as a moral imperative, rather than as a civil agreement with failure clauses to be rationally considered. The government does the latter; why should an individual who makes a contract with the government treat it differently?
What part of the contract says: "if you don't want to pay back the loan, no problem, we'll just forgive it!" ?
I've never heard of a loan contract that says that.
> If you pay back your loans responsibly, and another doesn't and gets their balance forgiven, who's the fool?
Neither?
What was the purpose of paying back the loan? I think it's foolish to give away large sums of money for no effect.
You mean pay them at all or pay more than minimum payments? I believe the latter but I don’t understand the former (maybe you’re talking about the covid deferments?).
Getting people who are on your program off your program is not how the bureaucrats in charge of these things grow their budgets, get more reports and advance their careers.
Show me the incentives...
It's almost like it's done on purpose.
SSDI is basically a “disability pension.” The idea is that you are permanently disabled and will never work again.
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.
Yup, the same thing happens with independent minors in the care of the State - they get a benefit from the state every month but if they have above [a tiny number saved] or earn above [a tiny paycheck every month] the subsidy is reduced, dollar for dollar. It’s an awful system.
If we want to help people, I think the first step is to assign each person/family an advocate. Someone who looks out for the person in need and reaches out to them. That person could help navigate the bureaucracy, explain to people their options, etc.
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.
> If we want to help people, I think the first step is to assign each person/family an advocate.
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 mean progressive rather than marginal, but yes.
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.
Interestingly, UBI is usually regressive for disabled people.
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.
Yes, there may be situations where certain people need more assistance than others. And it would require a bureaucracy to qualify and whatnot, but that is the same as the situation now. At least with a minimum amount of straight cash to everyone, a significant portion of the population no longer has to jump through hurdles.
“And it would require a bureaucracy to qualify and whatnot, but that is the same as the situation now.”
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.
Yes, I meant that at least most of the overhead is removed, and society can focus other resources on those who can use additional help.
I thought one of the big benefits of UBI was that it does away with all other social programs? Are you saying that is no longer the case?
I do not think that is possible, assuming society wants ro provide greater assistance to those with certain disadvantages, such as disabilities.
Also, how does it not just end up in inflation where disabled people can't afford to live, back at the original problem but now with extra steps?
Increased taxes on on higher income/wealth people. The goal would also be to reduce income/wealth gap.
Yeah, but it won't ever happen because it lays bare the function of taxation as (mostly -- sin taxes and virtue credits being the exception) the vehicle for a wealth transfer from rich to poor. And if we actually admit that then we have to deal with the awkwardness that is why even bother taxing people below the breakeven point?
While I think UBI is an interesting idea, it most certainly is _not_ the only thing to be done; it is not a silver bullet that will solve all problems related to money.
That's quite the employment program you're proposing.
My sister is disabled and has this problem. She has a pile of cash at home as a result of it rather than safe in the bank or in investments. Like, you'd think someone who's paralyzed has a life that's hard enough, but yet we've created infinite hoops for her to jump through still.
> The people in positions of power want her dead
As a family member of somebody in that position, I can understand that it's easy to have that kind of emotional perception.
However, as a logical matter, I can see how it is easy to make the exact opposite argument to yours. The government doesn't want to eliminate people who might be viewed as drains of resources. They want votes and voting demographics they can pander to. They want social issues they can shovel more money at and sneak some extra cash to their chosen friends. They want to hire tons of officials to oversee implementations for solutions to increase their fiefdoms and influence. They want a compliant voting block that is depending on them for just enough resources to survive so they'll be less likely to ever be non-compliant with any decrees.
> The government doesn't want to eliminate people who might be viewed as drains of resources. They want votes and voting demographics they can pander to.
Very curious, can you name any politicians that panders to disabled voters?
You’re misreading the post above. They want to be able to say things like “we passed this law to prevent fraud” or “we are tough on crime”. That the actions are counterproductive and hurt those they are meant to help us an externality not a goal.
I know this is off-topic, but do you still happen to have the slides for your "Indistinguishable From Magic" talk from a decade ago?
Uh …possibly? They are way out of date. I think my email is in my profile if you ping me.
Your email doesn't appear to be in your profile. Since the presentation out of date, do you have any pointers for where to look for up-to-date information?
sorry I totally missed this response. I dug up the slides:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/25qh0zjm7hgc43s/Hope%20Talk-Insepa...
Anandtech is a really good resource for semiconductor innovations:
https://www.anandtech.com/tag/semiconductors
Thanks!
Makes sense. You don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you can manufacture support through a thing it’s better to keep the thing around.
> Nope, it’s quite simple. The people in positions of power want her dead & see her as a drain on society no matter what she may bring to it (not that that should matter)
This is exactly how the Conservative party in the UK feel. Every one of their policies oozes this sentiment.
Some people might be shocked by your statements but I’ve dealt with and suffered the policies of the welfare department (DWP). It’s spot on
Bulk of democrat politicians, yes.
Bulk of democrat voters, no.
Yeah. Most Dem politicians aren't leftists. Many leftists vote Democrat out of, "what other choice do we even have. Not voting at all?"
Hell I bet there's even a sizable number of people who would be Republican's if it weren't for the fact their demographic has been personally victimized by them. Being gay, black, Hispanic, Muslim, but otherwise conservative puts you in such a weird spot.
There is nothing “conservative” about the modern Republican Party. The conservatives were run out in 2016.
Their views of what constitutes a family and how immigration should work are both pretty conservative in the traditional sense. Their economic and foreign-policy positions might be a complete nightmare-show.
Reagan threw his full support behind “amnesty” in the 80s.
Bush went out of his way to not let 9/11 be an excuse to target Muslim Americans.
McCain shut down one of his supporters cold when they tried to bring up the conspiracy that Obama was “a secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia Law to the US” and asked him to do his eulogy.
But on the other hand, even Obama didn’t support gay marriage at first.
Wait, what are you saying about Bush? If there's one thing his admin is known for it's targeting Muslim Americans.
But I'll agree, Dems still don't support gay marriage, pregnancy care, trans folks, etc. They just happen to be slightly better about it than Republicans are. Turns out being a minority in America is kinda a bad deal
https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/president-bush-s-islam-is...
Oh yes, "amnesty", that one-time thing where after we're done with that, the law will really mean what it says. How did that work out?
I thought it was clear from my use of their trademarked term that I am talking about politicians, and I quite obviously am not talking about People Who Vote For Democrats but Do Not Identify As Such.
It's unbelievable how much time, money, and wasted potential productivity the USA spends trying (and failing) to make sure that "undeserving" people don't have access to government welfare benefits of various kinds.
This is the correct framing: we are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year as a country, so long as the framing of that money contains the lie of deservedness.
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.
It’s even worse than you think. The military is constantly trying to close bases and get rid of weapons that aren’t needed to save money. But Congress blocks them at every turn. That’s the whole “government doesn’t create jobs. But don’t take away our make work military jobs.”
The military leaders have also been saying for years that our increase debt is an existential threat.
It's been shocking the amount of "emergency" funding for Ukraine that has been passed in the past 2 months. If it were for anything else other than the military, Republicans would have a gargantuan hissy fit over it and probably filibuster it to death.
And none of it helps any of “our great military men and women” that they claim to love. It only helps the military industrial complex.
Again this is not criticizing the military. It’s more of a critique of the defense industry and their lobbyist.
Eisenhower's farewell speech comes to mind here.
And it seems like it accomplishes the exact opposite. I dated a girl who worked in a drug and rehab facility and she'd constantly complain about how the people who actually worked and tried to improve their situations on their own weren't eligible for any help, but there were a set of regulars who were deadbeat losers with no desire to get better who would essentially use the facility as a hotel. I'm not saying the losers shouldn't have access, but having a job should not bar you from getting help.
This is one of the most insidious side effects of means testing. The moment you improve slightly, you cross the threshold and lose the benefits you needed to get established. Which can mean getting a job can worsen your income and quality of life, which is deeply fucked up.
Well said, it's insane the system is so poorly designed, it benefits the type people it's supposed to punish, while hurting the type of people it's supposed to help (according to the reasoning for why we have these laws in place).
Worse than that, we spend it on people with no net worth as opposed to the ppp loans that sent out millions to companies who didnt need it at all. Only accountability for the poor
I think the proper framing here is that this is a (failed) attempt to limit abuse of the system.
It's still bad, but I would rather work on the assumption that this is merely incompetence rather than malice.
At this point, not fixing it is indistinguishable from malice. We've known for at least a generation the side effects of means testing. Keeping them around is cruelty.
The amount of fraud against COVID relief programs (e.g. PUA) was pretty staggering. Extensive abuse of welfare programs may be much nearer than we'd like to think.
Yet the government will approve trillions in assistance to corporations without ever reading the bill
If you have too much abuse in the system trust breaks down and taxpayers won't support it anymore.
Abuse of all safety net programs is quite low. Lower than tax evasion by a considerable amount.
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.
You can also break trust by loudly and persistently exaggerating the prevalence of abuse in the system.
My key takeaways:
* 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
My key takeaways:
* 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.
Why have any limit at all. What the hell does a limit even accomplish?
To prevent a multimillionaire who becomes disabled from collecting disability because they don't need it.
They're punishing hundreds of thousands of people in order to prevent the abuse of a few dozen.
not sure where people live, but here in High Cost of Living place, I see more than a few large houses, in the hills, in bad repair, with many vehicles that have blue handicap tags that never move. My outside guess is that someone with a family history of owning property, got a house long, long ago, and rode out three or four decades of outrageous housing price increases while being careful with all the paperwork. Is this common? no. but I tell you with evidence of my own eyes, in more than a few cases, someone has a kind of stability and wealth that healthy, working people just cant seem to ever get here.
Dead on arrival.
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”.
>If it’s bipartisan, who are the republican co-sponsors?
Rob Portman:
https://www.portman.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/portm...
Ok, one Republican co-sponsor, and it’ll need at least 11 to pass the senate (Manchin will never vote for it).
If you think it’ll pass it’s probably easy money on predictit, right?
It won’t, dead on arrival.
>as you make more money and become more self-sufficient, you lose some of those gains to government policy
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".
> it is a basic income of sorts given to some people who have little or no other income
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?
Its highly inefficient for millions of individuals welfare recipients to being independently purchasing accommodation, entertainment, utilities, food.
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.
That's called institutionalization and nobody wants that for themselves or the people they care about.
Or it's called social housing, food assistance, and single payer healthcare?
Those already exists so presumably that's not what the comment I responded to is referring to, in addition it was put in opposition to welfare recipients having the ability to choose how they spend what they receive so there is no equivalency.
Do they? I mean, maybe, but definitely not in the States.
I've seen this in my own extended family.
$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 != SSDI
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.
https://www.disabilitysecrets.com/page7-5.html
I genuinely feel like the way a lot of government programs are designed, they actively discourage being responsible.
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.
This shit has been going on since the first serious attempts at welfare in the 60s.
It's not a new problem. It's the result of perverse incentives in the system from top to bottom.
Means testing (making sure benefits only go to poor folks) is such a colossal waste of time and money. And it creates perverse incentives where becoming slightly less poor can lead to a huge drop in benefits.
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.
I never understood why these thresholds are hard thresholds in the first place. It should make sense for the reduction in benifits to reduce gradually but it's pretty rare to see a policy like that
I learned this first hand when my family member started receiving SSI, and they said the government check your bank account to see if you have too much money. As a result, you see a line of elderly line up at local banks when it's payday, to withdraw the money out as cash and to keep the bank account balance as low as possible.
this is really tough for people with disabilities, since a lot more stuff then depends on medicaid. An easy example, if you qualify for medicaid then you qualified for the emergency broadband benefit, which was good for 50/month off internet. Or more complex, you get a budget to spend on home health care workers, transportation, respite care, therapeutic activities, etc., go over and you lose thousands of dollars of services necessary to live. thats even ignoring the actual medical benefits of medicaid
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.
Did those numbers ever make sense? Assuming they did, then pinning them to inflation would have kept them sane without needing additional legislation.
> And the threshold for it (SSA calls it “income disregards”) is so astonishingly low that I asked Ne’eman about it. He believes the number is a holdover from at least 1972, when SSI was created. SSI borrowed some of its numbers from a previous aid program for the blind, and didn’t index them for inflation. Fifty years later, they remain the same, despite a sevenfold increase in the consumer price index.
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
[2] https://findanyanswer.com/what-did-a-house-cost-in-1935
They make sense to the voters. People are actually strongly in favor of reducing them further, despite the already-obscene nature of the system.
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.
> Did those numbers ever make sense?
Only in a cruel, actuarial sense.
They never made sense.
This is a general problem with benefits programs and taxes that have cliffs instead of phaseouts/brackets.
As the article states, there are phaseouts in many of the programs involved. SSI does have an income-based phaseout, not a complete threshold - the $2k threshold is a wealth cap, there is a phaseout-based income cap as well.
> 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.
You can't do that. It's important to redistribute inflation every year in the budget so that you explicitly "help" your target demography and newspapers can write about that. /cynical
When the bill was written, $1500 (the max benefit at the time) was about $8900. Not too shabby. Seems like not linking it to inflation was an oversight.
Government programs that benefit poor people generally aren’t tied to inflation. This is not going to change.
"Homeless and poor people are so lazy and irresponsible with their money, they can't save it and invest it like smart and noble rich people. But also they save too much money and are cheating the system when they need assistance despite basic necessities being made as difficult and expensive to obtain as possible!" /s
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.
My brother is on disability, and has an ABLE account so that my family can give him some money above the disability funds.
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.
If you didn't know any better you'd think some of the people designing these plans wanted them to fail.
Blind person here; I'm not on SSDI myself, but I have friends who are. All this policy seems to encourage is financial crimes, bordering on money laundering. It seems like everybody is doing it, or at least everybody who I've talked to. I've seen everything, from very careful financial planning, including buying things and paying bills a lot earlier than needed in anticipation of large influxes of money, to withdrawing money in cash, which is easy to hide and easy to justify to a government official, to putting money in weird accounts which the IRS is unlikely to audit. I'm sure people who actually live in the US have seen a lot more examples of this than I have.
People have no idea. I've done Darpa internships in IT and full stack developer internships in DC, and could have a lucrative career someday, but I'm stuck in this strange pocket of SSDI where I can't afford to return to work for less than $70k and I'm not yet worth that much.
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.
I went to a special high school for kids with autistic spectrum disorder and we were basically all educated and given assistance for during transition to graduation getting SSI immediately.
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.
Disability benefits in the US is so absurd. I would characterize it as all or nothing. They often completely ignore people with “marginal” disabilities but if you are rich enough to afford a good lawyer, you guessed it, you can qualify for all these programs. Once you see it you can’t unsee how inefficient these programs are. There’s an entire industry designed to exploit government resources.
The same thing happens with university: For the FAFSA students are expected to contribute 95% of their savings before benefits kick in.
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.
Know a number of folks on SSI. Yup. This is real. One person I know keeps cash, when their account gets too high. That’s not so safe, as folks on SSI are often living in less-than-wonderful environments.
Also, people who take Social Security early, are prohibited from earning over a certain amount, but I think that’s different.
I live in france, and a few "counties" (départements) implemented such thing, at a higher amount (about 20k), but for welfare recipients. The amount is about 500 euros per month.
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.
I just got Kicked off of SSDI(I also revived SSI because my SSDI income was below 75% of the poverty level) but I plan to appeal but that $2000 dollar asset limit last set in 1987-1989 and never indexed to inflation is just too draconian and needs to be recalculated for 2022 dollars and actually Indexed to the inflation rate.
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.
This is how it works in Sweden as well for försörjningsstöd, which is something you can get if you have no income and you actively look for work. However, if you’re disabled, I’m pretty sure other rules apply.
Made a throwaway for this.
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!
Here I was feeling bad that a feature I designed and released had some edge cases around a small browser feature I hadn't fully considered.
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.
This is a horrible policy, but it seems there is a possible solution (for people with good enough credit, which means the most vulnerable people cannot do this):
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
It’s not easy for someone with disabilities and no demonstrable employment to get a zero-down-payment mortgage.
I've never been able to get a mortgage while on SSDI. It's theoretically possible. I do have credit cards and a car payment though, so access to credit isn't entirely non-existant. I'd love to get qualified for USDA loan. Seems like a pipedream though.
I actually faced this while researching how to aid a family member under the representative payee program and began to wonder how to spend their funds in ways that would benefit them and avoid accumulation of assets and all that stuff to remain below 2k. https://www.ssa.gov/payee/faqrep.htm
This was intended for the destitute to cover month to month expenses. It’s not designed for people with even modest means as an extra nest egg. And the host of ways to gather disability money really blows the mind. SSA’s next biggest job after doling out cash is to watch for waste, fraud, and abuse.
I can see a cash-only undeclared job or even like theft or drug dealing being being big temptations.
Can confirm based on my experiences with lower income folks. It's incredibly difficult to do things the "right way".
You can go read reports from the OG sociologists and they're talking about how people in the projects have all sorts of cash income so they don't lose their bennies and the gangs tax the cash. That was 60yr ago.
Can confirm from second-hand experience that this is a very real problem.
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.
Both income and asset tests need to be in phases, not cutoffs
And those phases need to be market linked in some way
Yes, this has been a problem for many years. I used to be a legal aid lawyer, and one often heard about people having to get rid of assets to qualify for life-sustaining benefits.
this whole discussion reminds me of the [Speerhamland system in England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system), which was supposed to guarantee everyone enough to eat, but because it made up the difference between the employer's pay and the speerhamland rate with government funds, it effectively created a maximum wage in the countryside.
The government cares mostly about maintaining its own power, not helping disabled people who happen to live in its territory.
I say this is the most deranged take on this possible, but then again, humanity tends to surprise me.
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?
"Now you must vote for anyone who doesn't threaten to cut your benefits, regardless of their other positions" seems pretty powerful to me.
No no, you need to package that into a convenient slogan. How about “vote blue no matter who”?
Vote red till your dead. Lol
The sooner you realize how many of these systems only exist to keep you poor and dependent the better.
What’s the alternative you’re proposing?
Repeat after me: welfare is not a job for governments
Would this eventually happen with UBI?
Do you mean whether UBI would have such a cut-off? Then it's by definition not universal.
UBI is always going to have a de facto cutoff where some people pay more in tax than they receive in UBI (unless your government is funding it solely by money printing or having massive amounts of oil per head of population).
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.
UBI is always going to have a de facto cutoff where some people pay more in tax than they receive in UBI
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.
> 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.
A smooth transition out is more or less by definition not a cutoff (a cutoff being a sudden thing). This is an important distinction, because it means it's never harmful to earn another dollar.
Since we don't have a wealth tax, there isn't even a smooth transition out along the dimension that the article discusses.
The article also discusses and criticises a 50% effective marginal tax on working which is absolutely how an UBI smoothly transitions if funded by an income tax, and in theory the taper could be steeper still. Not harmful to earn another dollar, but not especially lucrative either.
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.
If UBI could logically evolve into non-universal basic income, that should be a concern, because if people are dependent on that money, they can't really oppose the change.
You meant to ask if a government that does UBI can ever stop doing it and offering some other kind of assistance?
Not quite. I'm concerned that they would offer UBI, and then add conditions later. It's pedantic to think that officials would care that this is "not technically UBI anymore." It would be called UBI, but you would be required to comply with different standards to receive it.
A government can always take assistance down, add rules, expand, shrink, do whatever with it. It can also use whatever name it wants.
Then it seems like a very bad idea to put the security of your home, food, and livelihood entirely on the whims of the government to such a degree.
Hum... If you are saying that people shouldn't willingly depend on social assistance, I don't think you will find anybody to disagree with.
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.
If you're referring to the issue with inflation over time making old policy numbers no longer make sense, it could definitely happen, though I think most UBI proponents prefer a design that automatically adjusts for inflation for exactly this reason. But if you're referring to the part where onerous means testing and other eligibility rules make life harder for the very people we want to help, then no, I think one of the fundamental benefits of a UBI is that it avoids all of that.
>I think one of the greatest features of UBI is that it gets rid of all of that by design.
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.
UBI is a concept not a policy. Sure the government could create a policy called "UBI" and literally anything could be in it.
I'm not asking about the extreme mischaracterization of my position of "literally anything." I'm asking what safeguards are in place to keep UBI, as we know the term, from evolving into UBI-asterisk, with conditions on the recipients.
So far the strongest counter argument I have seen is "well then it wouldn't technically be UBI", which doesn't fix anything.
Without a constitutional amendment there’s no guarantee of anything, future congress being bound by past congress is a fundamentally terrible idea. Imagine what the slaveholders in the early 1800s would have tried to do if they could have passed a “slaves forever and nobody can ever change this law” bill (which indeed was what the confederacy tried to do with its constitution).
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.
Finally an application of Bitcoin?
Hiding money from the government? It's honestly only mediocre at that.
It’s sad to say but if you’re depending on the governments assistance don’t expect to be treated particularly well unconditionally.
I believe the fact these amounts are not pinned to inflation is generally intentional. The whole thing needs to be overhauled.
I've considered it. I'm Jewish and qualify for Israeli citizenship, and theoretically I could keep SSDI while living abroad. I'd prefer Spain though honestly. There's a Puerto Rico loophole that allows US citizens to move there under their former colonies program. You just have to learn Spanish and live in PR for a year before applying.
It's a lot to consider though.
Your comment seems to me somewhat unsubstantiated declaraction of stereotypical evil. That is, it isn't really saying anything we haven't already heard a lot, nor providing any additional context nor basis for it.
Complaing about downvotes is among the surest ways to accumulate more downvotes, on HN. It's explicitly discouraged by the guidelines [0]:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As someone with a close friend who has a childhood disability, the parent poster is pretty on the money. It does seem to depend which state you're in, because disability is administered by the state. Deep red states tend to make it miserable to work with them so people will just give up. I've heard so many stories of disabled people getting yelled at and told they're faking their very real conditions. It's disgusting.
"you're just saying people are evil!" is a rather banal dodge of the entire thesis of the article, that the system is indeed ineffective and cruel. It's using rules-lawyerism to suppress a point that you find too uncomfortable to address with an actual argument.
Frankly this is sort of a recurring theme on HN, where people tend to lapse into meta-argument or tone argument as a substitute for substantive discussion. It's a matter of degree but at some point these tactics do become a logical fallacy, it's a very enticing way to shut down an argument that you can't directly counter.
> a rather banal dodge of the entire thesis of the article
But I wasn't addressing the article, I was addressing the comment.
> people tend to lapse into meta-argument or tone argument as a substitute for substantive discussion
Like what we're doing right now?
Can I make the presumption that you’re not somebody with a significant disability & also don’t regularly find themselves talking at length with quite an amount of others in the disabled/disability support community? My deepest apologies if I’m incorrect about that, but it’s hard for me to imagine that coming out of one who is/does.
& yes, typically I’m not one to go “muh downvotes” but there is something quite unironically hilarious about speaking up about the disabled from a position of decade+ experience & then being downvoted to invisibility without a singular reply on a hyper-capitalist forum.
Btw. If you feel it’s unsubstantiated, please perhaps try reading the title of the article we’re commenting about…
> If you feel it’s unsubstantiated, please perhaps try reading the title of the article we’re commenting about…
If a comment's substance can be acquired by reading the title of the article, then by definition it adds nothing of substance.
Look, if the article's title is "1+1", it's just pointless to comment "that's 2 btw".
Notice how I'm ignoring all the ad hominems and just answering the core?
So much entitlement. You want the free money, there are rules. The 2000 dollar limit is perhaps too low--so that's something that can be adjusted--but the whole point of SSI is for low income disabled people. That's the point. SSDI is a different but similar program without that 2000 dollar limit.
They're demonstrably bad rules.
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.
The entitlement? Humans should be entitled to a life free of material suffering. Otherwise what is the point of creating governments and corporations if not to improve our quality of life. If you think the most vulnerable in society wanting help is entitlement then I suggest you stop using roads or visiting hospitals.
Roads and hospitals are paid for by taxes, usually paid by the people using them. Which equates to labor done by a great many people over time.
How ‘free from material suffering’ entitlement going to be paid for, and what does that even mean? Houses for everyone? Gold bars for everyone?
Is this the “poor people aren’t poor because they have refrigerators” 2.0 argument?
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.
I’m
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?
What it means practically is the basics like food, shelter, and healthcare. Beyond those basic needs, free education and basic financial security (no means testing or savings limit like for the example in the original post)
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.
You’re about to see a recession up close, I’m curious to see your perspective after that.
I would just like to point out that a recession is a prime example of why most of our current "scarcity" is artificial. In a recession workers are still present and physical capital is still present. The raw materials are still present and the mechanisms of government are still present. The problems lie with the financial system that facilitates exchange. A recession is not caused by "not enough resources" it's the aftermath of people taking too many risks with fake paper money. It's a non-sequitur to imply that a recession means that the government cant take care of its citizens.
Since expansion (often into areas that don’t work) and corresponding contractions (when that which doesn’t work is found and then stops as it becomes unsustainable) happens in every system humans have ever tried that I’m aware of, what do you think is the alternative?
I don't think there is an alternative to free markets, but I do believe that we can use the power of government to set price floors. For example let's say the government provides free housing for all citizens regardless of means testing. It doesn't have to be great housing, but it establishes a price floor that all landlords have to compete with by offering better housing or lowering their rents. No fear of homelessness, starvation, or death by uninsured illness also establishes a labor floor. People can take more time for a job search, or quit jobs that are exploitative/pay poorly. The government doesn't have to mandate a minimum wage, since jobs now must offer something more than a day-to-day subsistence. With advances in productivity we are more than capable of doing this but we allocate capital to other things in pursuit of profit. Think of how much capital was poured into web3 speculation that could have been used to actually establish a price floor for housing or a wage floor for labor.
Why would a landlord participate, or instead move to a more profitable outlet for their effort and capital? If even after that there isn’t enough housing (say it’s a desirable area so people want to move in), who is going to build it?
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.
The free housing I am referring to is housing built and owned by the government. Landlords are participating in the market because they have to rent apartments to make money. Look at Vienna's housing model if you want to see a successful example of this.
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.
Ah, but have you lived in a government housing project before?
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?
My mother lived in section 8 for a few years, although her housing was rural and fairly nice-- not so much in urban areas. Most of the things you listed I am against, I am against means testing and strict requirements for tenants. If someone wants to shoot up heroin in their section 8 I'd prefer them doing it there than out in the street. It has also been shown multiple times that housing the homeless actually saves taxpayers money:
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.
Glad it’s working for them - Singapore uses a similar model (MDB).
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.
> Roads and hospitals are paid for by taxes, usually paid by the people using them.
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.
No, they should not.
Lot's of disabled people have medical bills in the 10s of thousands. If you have a cutoff below that amount, it makes it so that they can't afford to not be poor which is a shit deal for everyone.
Not just medical bills -- even routine expenses (like paying rent, getting a car repaired, or replacing a household appliance) can easily run over the $2000 limit. People with disabilities shouldn't have to go out of their way to avoid having money.
The issue is these limits aren’t tied to inflation. 2k in 1920 was a significant chunk of change 2k in 2022 is close to the benefit being handed out.
As such simply raising the limit doesn’t solve the problem, indexing the original limit to inflation would.