Well, they also believe that the poor are all idiot layabouts, and if anyone is poor in the most amazing awesome doublemost mcbestest country on earth, it must be their own fault. So, a lot of aid is engineered to be uncomfortable to get and uncomfortable to be on, like financial homeless spikes.
One of the worst aspects of this for me is how brutal the means testing is for many assistance programs. They often turn eligibility into a sheer cliff face where the second you make even a dollar more than the cutoff you lose the whole benefit. But even if they don’t and there’s a more gradual reduction you’re often on multiple assistance programs if you’re poor and the reduction to all of them often puts you in a worse place than you stated in.
My partner is fully disabled, she’s got neurological issues where she’ll be pretty much fine one minute but with maybe like an hour at most of warning she could be fully incapacitated from a migraine brought on by pseudotumor. Not even because of the pain, she starts having trouble walking, standing up straight, remembering what she was doing. Sometimes she temporarily loses access to years of her life like the Cosmic Dungeon Master said “Roll 2d20, that’s how old you think you are for the next 2d4 hours”
So obviously that makes having me work right now basically impossible. Very few jobs are cool with your availability being subject to that kind of rapid change. So I stay home to take care of her and our kids. But back when her symptoms weren’t so severe and I could work I had to be very careful what kind of jobs I found because depending on how much I made we actually ended up losing more in assistance than what I made that caused us to go over.
Fantastic example, our oldest just got approved for SSI because they relaxed some of the asset/income restrictions and now my wife’s disability benefit isn’t too much money for him to qualify. We get Section 8 so our portion of rent is based on our income so our rent went up when he got SSI. Our SNAP amount also went down because our income went up. He got approved for like 200 something in SSI and between the rent going up and SNAP going down at the end of the day we get like $10 dollars more a month than we did prior to him getting it. This shit happens everywhere with these kinds of programs and is one of the many reasons people get trapped in poverty.
Well, they also believe that the poor are all idiot layabouts, and if anyone is poor in the most amazing awesome doublemost mcbestest country on earth, it must be their own fault. So, a lot of aid is engineered to be uncomfortable to get and uncomfortable to be on, like financial homeless spikes.
One of the worst aspects of this for me is how brutal the means testing is for many assistance programs. They often turn eligibility into a sheer cliff face where the second you make even a dollar more than the cutoff you lose the whole benefit. But even if they don’t and there’s a more gradual reduction you’re often on multiple assistance programs if you’re poor and the reduction to all of them often puts you in a worse place than you stated in.
My partner is fully disabled, she’s got neurological issues where she’ll be pretty much fine one minute but with maybe like an hour at most of warning she could be fully incapacitated from a migraine brought on by pseudotumor. Not even because of the pain, she starts having trouble walking, standing up straight, remembering what she was doing. Sometimes she temporarily loses access to years of her life like the Cosmic Dungeon Master said “Roll 2d20, that’s how old you think you are for the next 2d4 hours”
So obviously that makes having me work right now basically impossible. Very few jobs are cool with your availability being subject to that kind of rapid change. So I stay home to take care of her and our kids. But back when her symptoms weren’t so severe and I could work I had to be very careful what kind of jobs I found because depending on how much I made we actually ended up losing more in assistance than what I made that caused us to go over.
Fantastic example, our oldest just got approved for SSI because they relaxed some of the asset/income restrictions and now my wife’s disability benefit isn’t too much money for him to qualify. We get Section 8 so our portion of rent is based on our income so our rent went up when he got SSI. Our SNAP amount also went down because our income went up. He got approved for like 200 something in SSI and between the rent going up and SNAP going down at the end of the day we get like $10 dollars more a month than we did prior to him getting it. This shit happens everywhere with these kinds of programs and is one of the many reasons people get trapped in poverty.