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.

According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.

The funding available will be divided equally by all eligible people.

Then fraud becomes not the taxpayers problem, but the problem of other eligible people. Those people will get more if they can reduce the fraud rate.

Obviously for this to happen, the eligible people need to be empowered to do something about it - and a good way to achieve that is to give the money to a charity for the blind to distribute to the blind, rather than directly to the government's list of blind people. Obviously you need to make sure the charity has suitable governance, but there are already regulations to ensure that.

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.

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?

... or possibly "due to the layers of fraud paranoia, the fraud rate is absolutely minuscule". Difficult to know, I would think?

I know this is a subjective statement, but as I go through this process it just feels way, way, way over the top.

We could probably do with a lot less. We could probably make the process kinder. The experience is so humiliating and we do it to people who are already suffering.

Edit: Imagine, hypothetically, that the process were twice as kind but bumped the fraud rate to 1.5%. I would be totally OK with that. Maybe it’s worth spending a little extra public money to treat people with dignity.

I wish you the best of luck.

It’s like a lot of policy stuff: our congress critters have a very black-and-white approach to a problem that only comes in shades of gray.

And, thank you. I have a good support system these days and I think everything will eventually be OK. There’s just an unspecified amount of stupid stuff between here and there. :-)

Even experienced disability attorneys sometimes mess up.

From 2017 to 2019 they rapidly progressed from episodic to chronic. In 2019 I could no longer hold a job longer than a few weeks because my work was being interrupted too much. It was a sad year: I started the year in a VPE position but couldn’t hold a junior SE job by the end.

I am now in one of the phases of migraine (prodrome, headache, postdrome) virtually all of the time. My treatment plan is optimized at this point, there is no non-experimental intervention that is likely to improve the situation.

Extensive medical testing has provided no clue as to underlying physical phenomenon triggering these migraines. As far as physical medicine can tell, I’ve reached the “wait and hope” stage.

I am holding out hope in one area: I am in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (and the reason for that is something I will not share because it is deeply personal). Research is showing increasingly that emotional trauma can have some strange physical side-effects and I’m really hoping that processing trauma will eventually reduce my migraine frequency and intensity.

You've said you want to work so I hope you can at some point. I feel fairly confident that if you made an "Ask HN" post about your situation, someone could help you out with a very accommodating gig. Good luck

I’ve tested my ability to work four times since 2019 and three of the four have ended up being a burden on the employer (the third was a wash; it didn’t work out but I decided to write off the invoice). I’ve been on the other side of the table and I can’t do that in good conscience.

My thesis is that I should focus solely on feeling better until I can start doing some sort of sustained work; from there I can work my way up until I am able to do rewarding things with my skillset again.

The problem is that (coming back around to the article) our benefits programs have a welfare trap. These systems should be designed to help people who can reach some level of rehabilitation get there and protect the people who can’t.

I'm paraphrasing but basically to be eligible for Section 8 housing you can't have too many assets. Good financial planning would say to scrimp and save so that you can get make a downpayment to get a mortgage but you'll be kicked out of the section 8 housing long before you've saved enough to get out yourself.

Catch-22

The 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.

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.

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?

Buying a house requires signrifajt savings for a down payment, moving costs, and so on.

Subsidized housing isn’t meant to help people build up savings and accumulate possibly six figure savings to buy a house. Subsidized housing is meant to prevent people who can’t afford rent from becoming homeless.

If a subsidized housing program is structured in such a way that it’s a net financial win to be on it than to be self-sufficient (e.g. renting on your own) then it becomes a “trap” as you penalize anyone trying to escape it and you incentivize people near the threshold to stay below it.

If someone wins the lottery or gets a new job with a huge signing bonus or gets a huge inheritance then by all means go buy a house right away and skip the renting step.

However, we need to revoke their place in the subsidized housing program as soon as they can afford to be off of it. I think people in this thread are forgetting that subsidized housing is a very limited resource and therefore we need to focus it on the people who need it most. Leaving people in the program who are accumulating six-figure house down payments from the savings would suggest that they don’t actually need the program but are taking the place of someone else who does need the help.

I think it’s more that the supply of subsidized housing is so low that it’s literally only people in the worst kinds of situations that qualify.

Obviously someone saving for a 100k down payment doesn’t need it, but there’s a whole sea of people in between that have no options now. Rent is too expensive, and subsidized housing is unavailable (only goes to the people that need it most). Ergo, I’m stuck in my parents’ house until I die, unless I want to pay extortionate rent for a shitty apartment.

Meanwhile, the people that do get subsidized housing suddenly have both a nice house and a lot of ability to save. I can totally see how that breeds resentment.

I’ve heard it said that the best way to get a house would be to have kids, divorce, and then become a single mother. Which doesn’t seem to be too far from the truth.

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.

Section 8 might have some inefficient cliffs. But not allowing savings for a mortgage doesn’t strike me as one of them.

I’d rather some form of UBI-like assistance. Single program, means tested but no cliffs(just a gradual phase out of some sort), and no limits on what the assistance is spent on.

A big reason why we have these perverse rules in the first place is that people are absurdly concerned with controlling people who accept (certain types of) public money.

If someone can find a path to jump from dependency to ownership, why "should" aid programs be structured to prevent that?

I, for one, would be a fan of imposing similar restrictions on other aid recipients, like mortgage-interest deduction-takers and enthanol producers. I suspect many folks would abruptly notice the absurdities with such rules.

Because the next step from subsidized housing is to renting.

If we structured subsidizing housing programs such that they enabled people to save up for down payments, this creates a perverse incentive for normal renters to get into subsidized housing to accelerate their transition to home ownership. Any time you introduce a perverse incentive like this, you overwhelm the system as people who don’t need it start crowding out people who actually do need it.

Going straight from subsidized rental housing to home ownership doesn’t make sense. Going from subsidized rentals to non-subsidized rentals is the obvious next step.

in a perfectly efficient market, renting and home ownership costs exactly the same - not cheaper nor more expensive.

However, most home owners living in their home pay a premium for it, because they both want to secure their bid when they buy, and they are likely buying on more than just financial implications (like the location is great for their kids, etc). Therefore, a home owner is actually more likely to have a higher cost of capital over all - both the deposit and the mortgage added together, even if the mortgage interest by itself may be lower than renting.

Think of it this way - if renting was more expensive than the total cost of ownership, then an investor would borrow the capital needed for buying, and then rent it out and arbitrage the difference risk free. It is this mechanism that keeps the rent and the price of ownership at approx. equal.

In recent times, the price of ownership has grown due to the pandemic, and high availability of credit. Rent will follow, if it hasn't already, as landlords will not just eat the loss.

Which is not that far from the truth. At least on the UK, rent is an extortionary and ever-increasing tax on people who don’t have 150K to pay a deposit.

Why?

I mean that as a serious question. Housing costs in the US are absurdly front-loaded compared to renting, but they didn't used to be and there are other countries where they aren't. Why "should" housing be so expensive that six months or a year or careful saving on a living wage isn't enough for a down payment?

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.

Advancing your career in a way that should gradually decrease your dependance on government assistance instead cuts it off all at once, turning a raise into a massive pay cut, thus ensuring you don't climb the ladder and stay dependent on aid indefinitely. It's utterly perverse.

It also has a wealth cap, but that’s unrelated to the “make a dollar more and you’re done” idea that so many people hold, which is not how SSI income phaseouts work. The wealth cap is “you accumulate more than $2k at any one time, you’re done”, and that is different from making money resulting in a sudden loss.

It probably is not a great idea to have a wealth cap at any sort of a level that might be relevant to a middle-class individual. Someone shouldn’t have to destroy their safety net in order to qualify for benefits in the event they become disabled, and disability holders should not be barred from having enough cash to operate and to access the financial tools that would allow them to build their way out of poverty.

Maybe we could set a cap at $50k wealth or something but in the end who cares, if a few people in the top 1% end up using it that’s probably less costly than administrative costs of peering at everyone’s bank statements monthly.

Nor should there really be a wealth phase-out for benefits either imo. What is the benefit of making it harder for people who are just about to make the leap off welfare to actually take the leap?

I didn’t say they shouldn’t be allowed to save at all. Only that if they are capable of saving at the level required to buy a house and service a mortgage, they likely don’t actually need assistance.

The 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.

https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_35701.PDF

What you’re describing is true for many assistance programs, including snap, for example… but not section 8 as far as I understand.

You can see it in the parking lots, high end cars and high end finishes in apartments.

There is very little incentive to move out in a well ran subsidized property in NYC.

I’ve managed large developments 800+ units.

I'm currently living in a Section 8 unit that's changed ownership and is getting renovated, apartment by apartment, with residents moved to temporary units in the complex until their renovated units are ready. And the Management Company that's running things really is clueless and does not even care to even Apply for any federal programs that may be available to get proper broadband speeds to low income households.

There needs to be some Federal Requirement for Section-8 housing Management companies to be forced to apply for any Federal Programs available to them in order for the low income Residents to receive the aid set aside in these programs to help poor and low income individuals/Families get better Internet Access. And this is in a time where the Government wants every service application done online, even in the time before the pandemic. There are Jobs where folks can work from Home via online jobs/services but that requires higher speed internet capabilities than is provided/accessible to low income individuals.

This isn't the article I had in mind but it is related and interesting: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2013/9/21/two-new-y...

and includes this:

> The poor family is trapped in place. If they make the mistake of earning more observable cash, their rent will be increased by 30% of the increased earnings (that's how it works at NYCHA), and then they start taking away the other benefits as well.

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.

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.

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.

* The 1993 - 1994 congressional term[1], during which they tried and failed to do healthcare reform, but succeeded in passing bills for medical leave, NAFTA, gun control, violent crime, taxes, and education.

* June 30, 2009 - February 4, 2010 (72 working days total)[2], during which they passed a major healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Care Act.

From 1981 - 1992, 1995 - 2008, and 2011 - 2020, Republicans have held the presidency or at least one house of Congress. During 2009-2010 and 2021-present, they have also abused the Senate filibuster to obstruct almost the entire Democratic agenda, with the goal of making the public perceive Democrats as ineffective. (As you have seen for yourself, it worked!) In the current term, the Democrats have a bare 50%+1 majority, which means that the most conservative Democrat (usually Joe Manchin of West Virginia) effectively has a veto.

On top of that, the Supreme Court has been controlled by Republican partisans since 2006, when Samuel Alito was appointed. Currently there is a 5-vote majority of extreme Republican partisans. This creates an additional Republican veto point for effectively any Democratic legislation.

One can (and should) criticize the Democrats for not ending the filibuster when they had the chance. But the reality is that the American legislative process involves a lot of veto points, and it only takes control of one to kill a bill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/103rd_United_States_Congress#M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress

NAFTA doesn't really count here since it was passed over strong (but not unanimous) Democratic resistance with almost unanimous Republican support.

Or maybe it does, since while it was a break from the existing and prior policy orientation of the party, it was a Clinton policy which presaged the emergent dominance of the anti-worker neoliberal capitalist wing of the party that dominated the party from after it's defeat in the 1994 midterms until now (weakening a bit in the last several years.)

This isn't to let the Democrats off the hook, only to explain that Democratic voters are not uniformly behind improving these policies.

The democrats in office simply do not represent their constituents. The democrat-voting population is farther left than the democrat politicians. However, outside of the more radical democrats like Sanders and AOC, most democrats have been bought by the wealthy just like the republicans.

That is your opinion, and based on your experience in your cohort, and additionally does not really address what "more left" actually means. There are many different types of people that vote Democrat at many different stages of life, in many different industries and in different states/areas where certain things have more support than others. And that's before we even start breaking things out to being "left" socially or fiscally.

I don't think the answer is "quite simple" at all, at least not in the way you explained it.

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.

I notice we have not had Bernie Sanders on the Presidential ticket, despite two runs; and there is surely some reason for that.

Possibly the voters have identified that those candidates will not gain sufficient independent or Republican support to actual win in general elections.

In any case, it seems likely to be a lot more nuanced than you're suggesting.

Assuming that the primaries represent who will actually win a presidential election is as much of a mistake as assuming that polls are accurate when it comes to election day.

On the other hand, the far right thinks anyone left of Trump is a socialist and will vote Republican just to try to keep away socialism.

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.

Government programs don't need Republicans to add the dysfunction.

They tried to do so in January but Manchin and Sinema voted against it.

In fact they've already done so at least once:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/585192-senate-passes-bil...

At least here in Europe. Speaking from experience.

We have several people directly profiting from several ineffective policies targeting disadvantaged in the local Parliament.

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.

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.

"more control" ?

"Expanding welfare programs = more control" is some tinfoil hat thinking.

I want you to pause for a moment and think critically for a moment and consider the context of the conversation.

Right now, if you're disabled, you're given a paltry $841/month, and you're told that if you ever have more than $2,000 in cash, that $841 will be taken away. The government is forcing you to live in poverty. You can't save money. Imagine you found a way to start a business despite your disabilities, and single $2000 month of income takes all your benefits away. Any attempt at improving your situation becomes an all-in endevour, so you better not fuck it up, or else the government kicks you into homelessness after the $841/month gets taken away.

How is improving this program by lifting the $2K limit expanding control? Seems like it would reduce control if you ask me by giving you the freedom to make the attempt at improving your life without worry of failure.

It takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to call that a tinfoil hat theory when we're literally in a comment section discussion all the stupid things people on .gov aid have to do/avoid in order to ensure continued income. If that's not control what is?

I'm literally arguing in favor of increasing the asset limit so people don't have to jump through hoops to avoid losing their benefits. I'm arguing against those controls. How are you twisting this around?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-con...

https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/...

You can leave off "it never existed" if you immediately acknowledge that it did exist, but with constraints.

If the constraints/scaling are what you care about, then make the case that everyone is better off with an inefficient system of coercion and perverse incentives, versus a system where people are giving their time and money willingly out of the goodness inside them.

I do. Especially when people who need the help are from poor communities who can’t spare much - much less provide things like in home care, transportation, etc.

If you say gov doesn’t need to be involved then please show me who is gonna help. The only ones I know of are the same that throw queer kids or male domestic abuse victims out on the street. People are more charitable when they’re rich (or more accurately, on rising incomes), but they only help out people close to them. Poor people are dehumanized. That’s why we need the gov.

Or did you not like see the lines of cars 20 miles long during covid for food assistance?

There are plenty of stories about religious programs refusing to help those outside of their religion which presents a pretty big problem if we're supposed to rely on them for universal charity.

One recent story: https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-i...

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.

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?

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.

Wouldn't you be happy if more people were like your parents? If there were "expensive doctors" who felt in their hearts the need to help your aunt, free of charge? It's not an imaginary world, it just takes work to build. But the further we replace the spirit of charity with an impersonal, dysfunctional system of coercion, the harder it is to realize that world.

What’s even better is, this system already exists and is being utilized beyond its breaking point.

How do I know? Well, it takes 1 to 2 YEARS to be approved for SSI or SSDI and, if you can’t work, someone has to pay for your basic cost of living. Or you become homeless.

Anyone who is applying for SSDI and isn’t homeless is being supported by someone.

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.

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.

This is a pretty dishonest strawman on many levels. First, taxation-based disability support is "spirit of charity" at scale.

Second, local charity is not mutually exclusive with disability support and talking about "replace" makes a strawman.

Third, local charity is in no way guaranteed. Something happens and suddenly charities run out of funds and disabled people can die of hunger.

I invite you to not pay your taxes and watch what happens.

As a society? Societies are perfectly free to decide to stop taxation.

Even if you could make that argument that coerced individual decisions could result in non-coerced societal decisions, you need to consider the entire implication: society is being "charitable" to itself, which isn't charity, it's selfishness. Charity is giving to others. So your point is nonsensical on multiple levels.

I would, yes. But just hoping that the world is filled with people who are willing and capable of helping in this manner is not productive. Almost nobody has the time and resources and will to help in the ways that my parents have.

> If there were "expensive doctors" who felt in their hearts the need to help your aunt, free of charge?

That'd be nice too. I do not expect this to be a thing I can rely on.

Hard to do when malpractice lawsuits are a thing.

Can you please point me to these charities that help the disabled afford to live that I keep hearing so much about?

The process of applying for SSDI is horrible and demeaning and I’d really love to go with one of those organizations instead!

They get disgusting looks & “we’ll pray for your soul” (saying it as if they believe it’s already been damned to hell)

Over 12 years of dealing with things myself & making friends along the way in person & online.

Spending countless nights trolling through comments in countless amounts of old threads of very vulnerable people trying to get away from things like domestic violence while also facing severely disabling medical issues (often but not limited to younger people with abusive parents somewhat controlling their lives via their disability) & reaching out to/begging quite literally wherever they’re able & overwhelmingly being turned away.

Of course, you can always say that they/I are LARPing & there’s not much I can do about that unfortunately.

If you’d like a bright side/silver lining to any of this - places that attract minorities/marginalized groups are often the most helpful (geeze, wonder why) & if shit ever truly hits the fan in your life, make your way to your nearest Sikh Gurudwara.

As long as you show the most basic humility & respect the few things they ask you to observe in their place of worship, they will go so far out of their way to try to help you in every way they can. Unfortunately, malicious people tend to take advantage of this in bigger cities & some are starting to get slightly jaded. I cannot blame them, such is life.

I’m not trying to say all religions orgs & charities are shit across the board. Perhaps it seemed that way. I’m just saying that they’re very much not as much of an answer that some of society seems to think they may be, & there are some truly awful people among them that will kick you harder when you’re already at your lowest point. (As with everywhere/everything)

Prior to such programs, level of help was far more variable and often dependent mostly on family.

I've seen clerks actively discourage people from asking for the benefits even before the official evaluation.

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.

She'd be dead in the ground if conservative policies ran everything.

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.

It is not surprising that the government functions like the people that elected it. If your community is comprised of assholes, you get cruel policies.

Welfare traps are definitely a thing in countries and cultures with “safety nets that works”, fwiw.

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.

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.

Someone with a projected lifespan of 20-30 more years, 2000 a month income, and no projected time frame in which they are expected to be able to earn an income who is actually successfully subsisting on that income of 2000 a month needs an input of 24000 per year to go on subsisting indefinably adjusting for inflation.

If they had $48,000 in the bank it wouldn't meaningfully effect their need. In fact making them spend down everything they have before helping them is pretty stupid it renders their life very fragile and less likely to be stable long term and doesn't even save much money. The equation begins to change only when funds on hand are sufficient to meaningfully change inflow or pay for capital investment like buying a home outright or buying a second property for income.

The turnover figure where someone doesn't NEED to have an actual income is actually reasonable measured in YEARS of income whereas the actual figure is now a single month of income.

For an alternative look at health insurance. It's possible to go from free insurance to no insurance based on a 10c an hour raise at your part time job. Most reasonable upward economic trajectories move through successively better paying positions towards healthy finances. However if you can in a single small raise go from +2% wages to -50% actual economic health moving upwards might be a quick path to homelessness before you can actually complete your upward path. This is especially true when yourself + spouse costs not 2x the cost of insuring yourself but more like 3x.

A non moronic idea might be to allow poor people to keep the same insurance that used to be free at an increasing cost such that any raise at all was ALWAYS a step up.

> the people who pay may be legitimately resentful when their money is going to strangers who don't in fact need it.

Sane solutions are not found by appealing to the emotions of ignorant, selfish, hateful people. They are found by doing math and projecting the probable results of the effect of alternative policies.

It's one thing to give someone benefits to support their person, it's another to give them benefits to support their person AND their existing savings. It's pretty natural to be less generous to someone who already has the money to pay for what they're asking you to pay for.

> Sane solutions are not found by appealing to the emotions of ignorant, selfish, hateful people.

You're not going to get "sane solutions" with that attitude. You're going to get people to feel good about ignoring your ideas because you insulted them.

Nope. This makes no sense. You're replacing their income because they can't generating any. That's it. You have no business in their rest of their life at all. Your job is to determine whether they can generate income or not and give them money if they can't, nothing else.

So, in your view, a disabled multi-millionaire should be able to collect government disability payments?

You may think this is a problem narrowly scoped to income, and that's fine. However that doesn't mean that's the only way to look at it, and that anyone who looks at it differently is doing it wrong.

> You have no business in their rest of their life at all. Your job is to determine whether they can generate income or not and give them money if they can't, nothing else.

Sorry, no. That's not how it works.

Fair. But I'm resentful of the big fraudsters like Rick Scott.

I understand that this is probably a stupid question, but I'm coming from a place of ignorance: Do people who dislike/resent this not also get upset that ex. their insurance pays for things people don't "need"? Or would the kind of person who makes this complaint also not be likely to have insurance?

But to me, the emotions don't match the financials. There's always a trade-off between false positives and false negatives; the more you prevent people cheating the system, the more you deny benefits to people who need them, and vice versa. And enforcement has its own cost. But nobody feels bad about paying for too much enforcement.

Somebody needing assistance is presumed to need it, until proof is found that they are cheating the system. This will let some people use the system fraudulently, but it ensures that it catches the vulnerable that truly need it.

Neither the group that needs help (and their supporters), nor the group that doesn't want to give hands out to people who refuse to work but could, have reason to object to something like that.

The actual problem is the red meat that welfare/socialism is to our political bases in the US, and the incentives of politicians, on both sides of the aisle, to ensure it persists. If you do the obvious thing to actually address the problem, neither side can use it any longer to stir up the base. So the incentive is to not actually fix it.

The $2000 number is a cap for wealth, not income.

The problem isn’t having a phaseout or not anyway - we could set a wealth cliff of $50k and that would be perfectly fine. It’s the numbers that matter, where the phaseout or cliff is placed and how steep a phaseout. $85 a month is a redonkulous place to put the phaseout even if phaseouts are “better” - that is a worse policy than a 50k a month cliff!

And you’re right, the reasons the number hasn’t been adjusted since 1935 (in 1989 the number was inherited from a prior program, it wasn’t adjusted at that time) is because of political will. Social spending on anyone other than the elderly is extremely unpopular in the US.

I honestly don't care if $85k is the cutoff. I don't care if there is a cutoff at all (but I recognize some people don't like the idea that if a millionaire becomes disabled he'd be eligible for some amount of money from the government). If someone becomes disabled or whatever, and they have money saved from working, why would they not get benefits? Why do they have to deplete their savings first to get shitty benefits? Social security doesn't have an income or asset cutoff; why does disability?

I actually personally agree with the sister post of just...paying people based on their disability, without caring about how much other income they're able to generate, or assets they collect. But I recognize how politically untenable that is.

Suppose that between $25,000 and $35,000 income, you start paying taxes, you lose food stamps, you have to start paying toward your medical insurance, you lose your daycare assistance, free school lunches, etc., etc... each one of those could be staggered, but the net result is just overwhelming.

I'm not a big fan of social programs; but if we're going to do them, they should at least be done sensibly.

It's even simpler: stop means testing individual programs, that's what progressive taxation is for. If you are going to give someone benefits due to a particular level of disability, give them benefits calculated based on that. If they have more outside income than you would expect with that disability, good for them, and they’ll also pay more taxes. Same with other special-circumstance aid qualifications (for general poverty support, this reduced to UBI.)

The process to get started was so opaque that the local 600 (camera union, I’m not even a member but they didn’t care) held a live zoom session where they screen shared with us and had us all follow their exact instructions on what boxes to check, what to fill out, etc. Folks still had trouble.

Again, it was quite the revelation.

That weekly job search/reporting requirement is not so hard for anyone working out of a union Hiring Hall as one needs to just go to their local and get the Union Rep to sign their weekly job search booklet and they have that over the phone reporting maybe but I used to go weekly to my UI office as I lived only a few blocks away from the office but that was a few decades back and not over any pandemic where the UI Offices where closed.

UBI would fix those perverse incentives (80% marginal "tax rate" for the next few hundred after the first 100 (per month), then an about 300~500€/month wide band with 90% marginal tax rate, followed by iirc another couple hundred at 0% marginal, and then hitting around 20% marginal (going up in piecewise-linear progression)).

But if UBI is paid out via extra taxation, then it will not induce inflation (or at least, not overall - it might induce some inflation in goods/services which wouldn't have been in demand but for the UBI, such as low cost labour). The higher taxes taken from the higher income people will reduce their demand, and thus balance out.

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.

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?

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.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/you-c...

It's much more complicated than calling people "fools" for paying.

TBH the program is a disaster and it's really, really disappointing that the loans won't just simply be forgiven. I personally know many people held back from economic participation because of federal student loans. Even if you want to be all bs moralistic about the responsibility of paying debts back, from an economic perspective the loans should be forgiven.

> all bs moralistic about the responsibility of paying debts back

It's dishonorable to not pay back money you borrowed. I'm sure if you loaned someone money, and they said "bs" when you expected repayment, you'd be very put out.

P.S. I've had people who've stolen money from me contact me years later wanting to do business together. I don't understand modern morality, or how they'd imagine I'd ever work with them again.

The fact that the promise was made to the taxpayers doesn't make it honorable to break one's word.

It's also a major insult to every person who worked hard and paid back their loan.

This forgiveness program is a classic "moral hazard".

I've never heard of a loan contract that says that.

Neither?

Show me the incentives...

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.

Sadly, most people have to advocate for themselves. They have to research what they need to do to get benefits, try to figure out how to navigate the poorly designed system, make calls, fill out paperwork, submit documents, etc. Poor people may not have the mental/emotional energy to go through all this.

I know, I know. Sometimes this is the system behaving as designed. The government makes it hard for people to get benefits so it doesn't have to pay as much. Such design is despicable.

The first and last step is to just give them cash. Give everyone cash indiscriminately. If we want to help people.

To ensure the the wealth is not being transferred from poor to wealthy, you have marginal income/wealth or marginal sales tax rates.

You can give people cash. You also have to kill a lot of restrictive zoning laws, because new housing can't be built until they go away. You need to require new housing to pay for new infrastructure to support itself, and then you need to require old housing to pay for maintaining their infrastructure, too. You need to kill off local funding of education in favor of universal funding of education, because otherwise the poor kids get substandard schools and teachers.

You need to fund public transit, and it needs to be aimed at getting people not just from their homes to work and back, but also to schools and stores and entertainment.

Everything has to be automatically indexed to inflation, or else you get the same problem ten to twenty years later.

It’s just straight-up more expensive to be disabled than non-disabled.

This was a big discussion in the disabilities community around Yang’s UBI in 2020.

I find UBI intriguing, but it wouldn’t necessarily free us from complexities like this.

I’m certain it would be less onerous than what we deal with now. It’s hard to describe the disability process as anything but “onerous”.

As long as those with needs greater than the average population are accounted for, I (cautiously) favor this idea. One of the hardest things about being disabled is that suddenly many people feel entitled to make choices for you. I sorely miss having the control and choice in my life that I had when I was able to work.