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Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid, medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent vouchers, pell grants, job trainin
by onesafari 4y ago
Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid, medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent vouchers, pell grants, job training programs, etc.
- suifbwish 4y agoYea except it only benefits you if you are way below the poverty level. We need to make sure every one is benefitted so we don’t deincentivize seeking higher paying jobs just to keep basic benefits.
- tastyfreeze 4y agoHow do we pay for an expansion of federal benefits? The ones we have are already quite cumbersome on the federal budget.
- DarylZero 4y agoMaking the benefits universal would increase everyone's personal budgets to compensate.
- tastyfreeze 4y agoThe government's money was formerly your money. I would prefer to keep my money and help in my local community than pay more taxes to distribute wealth.
- suifbwish 4y agoActually the money was never yours, it was created and is governed by the state. Every paycheck we get is made up of units that were created by the state out of thin air.
- DarylZero 4y agoWell your previous logic is refuted and now you're just moving on to some other shit like you never said it. Not a good look.
- lostcolony 4y agoYep. Politicians for years have made it super hard to get benefits, and now decry people not wanting to work. There's a huge gap between "eligible for all benefits" and "makes enough to offset the loss of benefits", and no clear way to cross over short of getting paid $20+ an hour. Trying to make benefits reduce proportional to income would work, but requires a lot of bookkeeping and proof (and, of course, some political will), so that's unlikely to get traction...and raising the minimum wage to the amount necessary so that any job will take one over the gap is -also- politically undoable. So, yeah. Lots of safety nets, all of which require you to live in extreme poverty to qualify for, and which still don't equate to a reasonable standard of living.
- seoaeu 4y agoThe problem is more that there's a whole bunch of different programs that don't make sense together. The "right" thing to do would be to combine all of them and make it so that you lose say 35¢ of benefits per extra $1 of income, so that even after tax it's still always better to earn more. Unfortunately, everyone is afraid that any attempt to overhaul the welfare system would be co-opted by those looking to gut it instead. So we're stuck with a broken system
- DarylZero 4y agoJust make all the benefits universal, so they never go down no matter your income. This is the right solution mathematically. Politically though it's divisive because it also makes the programs harder to repeal in the future.
- imtringued 4y agoAll you need is progressive income taxes and taxing welfare benefits as income. Make it so welfare dollars bump your income tax bracket faster than income from a job.
- daenz 4y agoIt's not convenient to know that when your goal is to smash capitalism.
- DarylZero 4y agoNot sure if you're aware of this, but it's just a lie, and the goal of telling that lie is political conservatism.
- seoaeu 4y agoWho doesn't know this? The problem isn't that there's no safety net, the problem is that navigating it is a maze and there's tons of cracks for people to fall through. Many, many people don't get the help they need because of that. Take rent vouchers: only some people who "qualify" actually receive vouchers because there is a cap on the total number the government gives out. Or the EITC: to get the full benefit your income has to land in a narrow band. Or SNAP: all sorts of weird restrictions, and tons of people who are eligible but who don't know to sign up
- DarylZero 4y agoOr here's an interesting fact: SNAP (food stamps) have cost-of-living adjustments. When food prices go up, SNAP benefits go up. But SSI benefits count SNAP as income and there is a dollar-for-dollar downward adjustment for every increase in SNAP. So if you have SNAP, your SSI benefits will _decrease_ with an _increase_ in cost-of-living!
- rr808 4y agoIf you own a couple of grand in assets you no longer qualify for SNAP. Which is crazy given that 15 million people rely on SNAP.
- seoaeu 4y agoSeems in a lot of cases the limit is $2500! Even a very modest emergency fund is probably going to be double that...
- DarylZero 4y agoIn practice you can just keep your savings in cash and not disclose it.
- burntoutfire 4y agoThe idea of food stamps is to give you food when you literally can't buy it yourself, not when you have a couple grand in your bank account.
- DarylZero 4y agoIt has a convoluted mess of programs, often mutually exclusive, that each have separate requirements and "churn" people off their benefits regularly with complicated and recurring bureaucratic burdens. It's not actually "large" in the sense of total spending relative to other counties.
- Bud 4y agoAaaaand apparently, many also lack even the most basic level of clue about how many gaping holes there are in that net and how many people fall through that net.