This makes absolutely no sense from any angle. US politics is so messed up right now. The entire right is lost in a personality cult and is driven more by triggering the libs than actually effecting change for their fellow citizens or the country as a whole. And the entire left is on a rampage to make sure they alienate as many people and supporters as possible and would much rather focus on symbolic protesting on issues they have no impact over as opposed to real issues they can help. The center is sensible and fairly effective but was small to begin with and is rapidly getting squeezed from both sides.

Re: this specific issue, it’s very obvious that universal programs are always more successful. They build a strong political and support base across the spectrum of voters without creating any losers who are deliberately excluded that would be motivated to end them. Further, more often than not any sort of means discrimination costs way more than the money saved through the means discrimination. And that’s even before the hoops the means discrimination adds to the lives of the poorest to prove their eligibility.

The means discrimination should be done once on the income tax side. There’s an extremely well established process for that and will be done anyways. Setting up ad hoc processes for each program on the benefit side simply doesn’t make sense.

And yet contra all the information we have the people proposing these policies will go out of their way to make their own policies less effective and more expensive as we’re seeing with these unnecessary riders.