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Comment by onesafari | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Who 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

Or 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!

If 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.

Seems in a lot of cases the limit is $2500! Even a very modest emergency fund is probably going to be double that...

The 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.

Yeah it's a dumb idea. Making people spend down their savings when they have no income to pay for food.

What else are savings for then?

Well if you only have $2.5k and no income it's probably going to housing costs.

(Am I here to answer stupid questions...)

The idea of an emergency fund is for unexpected expenses like car repairs or a medical bill. The primary use of SNAP is to supplement an employed person’s income so they are able to afford food.

In practice you can just keep your savings in cash and not disclose it.

It 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.

Yea 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.

How do we pay for an expansion of federal benefits? The ones we have are already quite cumbersome on the federal budget.

Making the benefits universal would increase everyone's personal budgets to compensate.

The 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.

Well 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.

Actually 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.

Yep. 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.

The 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

Just 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.

All 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.

Aaaaand 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.

It's not convenient to know that when your goal is to smash capitalism.

Not sure if you're aware of this, but it's just a lie, and the goal of telling that lie is political conservatism.

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