This week’s post is by contributor Timothy Wood.
The way we calculate means tested benefits in our social safety net may not be the sexiest issue, but it’s incredibly important and profoundly broken. The people it affects are the least equipped to advocate for change. Foremost among them are the five million children who don’t have adequate access to food. So, until the hungry six-year-old can write their representative in crayon, we may have to pick up the slack. To do this, we need not get mired in the weeds of number crunching and budgetary analysis. The problem can be plainly demonstrated at a grade school level, or as Mark Twain might have put it: something even a senator could understand.
It begins with a mechanism known as “means testing”, which is when the government scrutinizes your finances to make sure you’re poor enough to qualify for help. On paper, the idea makes sense. In practice, it leads to “welfare cliffs”, where the self-defeating structure of social programs incentivizes recipients to stay “poor enough”, locking them into a cycle of poverty and dependence. Congress and the states have made a series of cliffs where people are punished for doing better — and we need to do better than that.
Among our many means tested programs is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or what most people call food stamps. Starving is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “widely regarded as a bad move”, and so the government will specifically help you buy food. You might not enjoy the finer luxuries, but at least you have breakfast. Picking a state at random: for a family of four in Minnesota, if you make around $2,300 or less per month, you can get up to about a thousand bucks of benefits. But if you make one cent more than that threshold, you get nothing. So, you can make $2,300 of income plus $1,000 of benefits for a total of $3,300 a month; or you can earn $2,300.01 and get no benefits — making you functionally $1,000 poorer because you earn more. This should also be “widely regarded as a bad move.” Sadly, it isn’t.
There are deeper issues with the formula for SNAP benefits. It assumes the average home will spend 30 percent of income on food, when actually the average household spends 12.4 percent of income on food, with the largest piece of the pie being 33.8 percent on housing. The means testing criteria are based on old figures that almost certainly need updating, but don’t hold your breath: the Senate needed to hold a vote in 2012 on whether senators could have calculators on the floor during budget debates. You’d have thought that when we gave Congress the power of the purse, that purse would have had a calculator in it… or a slide rule… or today, really just any smartphone. Apparently, that was asking too much.
People who are assholes will argue that means testing is more complicated than that, and that the formula does actually taper off according to your income. Despite being amoral sphincters, they are not completely wrong. Benefits for SNAP are indeed adjusted according to income — just up until the point where you hit a hard cap and get nothing. A hill that leads up to a cliff is still a cliff, and when a family’s bottom line approaches that precipice, the end result can look like this chart from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare:
This is just the way the math works out. There are tipping points where you’re richer so long as you manage to stay poor enough. This simply shouldn’t be. The whole point here is to help people, but we’re not helping people who are on these thresholds.
All of this assumes, of course, that a family is taking advantage of every benefit available. In reality, 13 million Americans in poverty are entirely disconnected from the social safety net. Navigating the labyrinthine patchwork is not easy. I’ve got a graduate degree in this kind of thing, and I still don’t understand it all. Congress has, presumably with good intentions, constructed a completely disjointed system — and then to add insult to injury, they left half of it to the states to create more disjointed systems. It shouldn’t need saying, but the basic needs of people living in West Virginia are not meaningfully different from those living a few miles away in East Virginia. What this system produces is a tangle of bureaucratic yarn that resembles a conspiracy theorist’s corkboard:
(We’ll mostly overlook the fact that they said “myriads of” instead of simply “myriad.” For the record, if you combine two “myriad somethings” you just get one bigger, singular, myriad. It’s like if you get gonorrhea from two different people. You don’t have two gonorrheas. You just need to see a doctor for the one, and then sit quietly in a dark room contemplating why your parents are disappointed.)
Returning to the topic at hand, this is the dilemma people on public assistance face. It’s not just SNAP; it’s nearly everything in this arena. And many programs aren’t neatly calculated like SNAP. For something like Medicaid, which provides health insurance to those who cannot afford it, you either have it or you don’t. There is no calculation where the government considers 30 percent of your income and then pays a percentage of your medical expenses. This matters enormously if you have serious health problems but aren’t quite “poor enough” to qualify; and it’s a big reason why healthcare accounts for two thirds of bankruptcy filings.
Someone on public assistance doesn’t merely need a raise; they need a raise large enough to jump over the welfare cliff and break even when they lose their eligibility for benefits. What is needed is to soften these cliffs into more gradual hills that properly taper off and incentivize people to earn more and graduate out of welfare. From the standpoint of compassion, supporting common sense public assistance makes sense because we don’t want people to be cold and hungry or forgo needed medical attention. Even taking a more cynical approach, fixing this broken system can be seen as a form of riot control. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but a woman scorned ain’t got shit on a mother who can’t feed her kids. Mess with enough moms, and they’ll overthrow your government. There’s a reason why “bread riot” is a historical term, because all bets are off when your kid looks up at you with hungry eyes. Men may write revolutionary pamphlets when the mood strikes, but when it’s a mom holding a head on a pike outside Versailles, you just met the critical intersection of Fucking Around and Finding Out.
Nobody, whatever their politics, wants people to be dependent on public assistance and trapped in a cycle of poverty. There are not many places where Rand Paul and Ru Paul can find common ground, but this should be it. We want the American dream. We want people to grow and flourish and be independent in a system that provides a clear path to doing exactly that.
My family was eligible for food stamps once. As a child, my father had broken ties with the Army, at least for a while, and it turns out that field artillery isn’t a particularly marketable skill. He worked at a Pizza Hut and my mom worked at a chicken restaurant, which, despite being in Kentucky, actually wasn’t KFC. She couldn’t bring herself to use food stamps. The shame of standing in line and pulling out the World-War-Two-esque ration card to pay for groceries while I sat in the cart was too intense.
The average person doesn’t want to be on benefits. Sometimes they need it, but they don’t want it. They want independence just like the rest of us, and we need a social safety net that helps them transition to that. The solution involves grade school level math. Your benefits have to decrease at a level that is less than your income increases. It can’t be a cliff, because most people don’t much like jumping off those. We’re not fixing poverty by having a hard income limit on means tested programs; we’re entrenching it.
People aren’t stupid. Well, okay, some people are stupid. Kanye West exists. College Dropout is still a pretty good album. But I’m getting off topic. Your typical person trying to run a household isn’t completely stupid. They do what everyone does, from Main Street to Wall Street. They look at the pros and the cons of big choices, and they’re not going to throw money in the trash over the regrettable state of needing public assistance. We can align the incentives while also helping people. If helping people doesn’t resonate with you, then you’re not the target audience here. If it does resonate, then take this message, write it in crayon, and send it to your lawmakers. Use small words because they have a disability called “being in Congress.” Hopefully they’ll understand.
See also: “We Won’t Prevent Your Cancer, You Have To Start Dying First”
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I'm sorry to undercut your snarky aside, but "myriad" is used metaphorically to mean "many" or literally to mean "10,000," the same as "dozen" is used to mean "12." It might be that if you add a lot of apples to a lot of oranges, you have a (bigger) lot of fruit. And you can use "myriad" in this way. But used literally, "myriad" is like "dozen." You can have several dozens of things, and if you have 30,000, then you have myriads.