#means testing

[liberalsarecool]

'Means test' is conservative cruelty. Cutting funds, programs, and assistance for the most deserving of care/stability is the religion of the Right. Punch down. Think small. Act small.

#means testing

[thoughtportal]

#twitter #tweet #tweets #means testing

[probablyasocialecologist]

Consider the remarkable concept of “lunch debt,” with which a student is burdened when their parents haven’t been able to put enough money into their school account. When they get to the front of the line in the cafeteria, they might be told that because of their debt, they can have only a jelly sandwich (no hot meal for you, Oliver Twist). In some cases, kids have been forced to wear stamps or wristbands so staff (and their peers) know who they are. How should we solve this problem? One option would be to take the already complex system through which children in public schools are fed and layer more complexity on top of it. Set up a few new means-tested programs, create funding streams that school districts can apply for, offer some grants. Or we could just give every kid lunch. And breakfast too, for those who want it. Imagine: Children just walking into the cafeteria and getting fed. No accounts that parents have to keep up, no time spent assessing families’ incomes or processing payments or running down parents who haven’t paid — no “lunch shaming” — none of that. Kids just eat.

#means testing #welfare #lunch debt

[mitchipedia]

Biden's intent to means-test student debt reduction—violating a promise to make student debt reduction universal—threatens Democrats' election chances in 2022, says Cory Doctorow.

Democrats campaign against universal benefits, claiming they'd be free even to the wealthy. But if college was free in America, only 1.4% of the benefit would accrue to rich kids.

"College debt relief is hugely popular, especially among the voter base that Dems will have to turn out to avoid catastrophic losses in the 2022 mid-terms ," people with fewer economic resources. College debt relief could help close the racial wealth gap and build the Black middle class.

College debt relief won't much benefit the rich because the rich mostly don't pay for college by taking out student loans. If forgiving student debt helped the rich, politicians would have done it already.

Means-testing generates red tape. The rich can always hire people to get around red tape. It's the middle class and poor that get tangled up in red tape to the point of paralysis.

I took out student loans to go to college, I paid them off, and I support forgiving student debt today.

#red tape #means testing #college loans #Cory Doctorow #Pluralistic

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Here are just two of the corporate giveaways hidden in the rushed, must-pass, end-of-year budget bill

Yesterday, Congress finally voted through the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.

This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).

Let’s start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal’s [DINO-MA] SECURE Act 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings — netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal’s SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.

The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions — ones that guaranteed that you wouldn’t starve or freeze to death when you retired — with accounts that let people gamble on the stock market, to be the suckers at Wall Street’s poker table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The market-based gambler’s pension is a catastrophic failure. Half of Americans have no retirement savings. Of the half that have any savings, the vast majority have almost nothing saved:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Retirement_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:have

All in all, America has a $7 trillion retirement savings shortfall:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IB_19-16.pdf

But for a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, tax-free savings accounts like ROTH IRAs are a means of avoiding even the paltry capital gains tax that you have to pay if you own things for a living, rather than doing things for a living. Propublica’s IRS Files revealed how ghouls like Peter Thiel avoided tax on billions in “passive income” by abusing tax-free savings accounts that were supposed to benefit the “middle class”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

Meanwhile, Social Security is crumbling, thanks to a sustained attack on it by the business lobby and its friends in both parties. Progressive Dems had sought to amend SECURE Act 2.0 by inserting some clauses to shore up Social Security, and none of these were included in the final bill.

One of the fixes that died was the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown [D-OH] and Rob Portman [R-OH]. This act would have tweaked the means-testing for Supplemental Security Income, which supports 8m low-income disabled adults and kids. Right now, you can’t collect SSI if you have $2k in the bank, a limit that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation, $2k in 1980 is $7226.00 in 2022).

The $2k savings cap means that you have to be substantially below the poverty level to receive $585/month in SSI assistance — this being the only source of income for the majority of SSI recipients. Means-testing is a self-immolating fetish for corporate Dems and in retrospect, this betrayal seems inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

(Notice how no one proposes means-testing billionaires when they get PPP loans or hundreds of millions in IRS “refunds” — like Trump, who paid substantially less tax than you did:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/trump-income-tax-returns-detailed-in-new-report-.html

And it was a betrayal: progressive Dems bargained with Neal and co not to publicly condemn SECURE Act 2.0 if they could get some concessions for the 8 million poorest disabled people in America. In the end, Neal rug-pulled them. Of course he did! This is Richie Fucking Neal, the best friend the Trump tax giveaway ever had:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#richie-neal

As with everything Neal touches, this screws poor people in multiple ways. First, it leaves the SSI cap intact. But it also creates a giant unfunded liability in the federal budget. Technically, there’s no reason this should lead to cuts. The US Treasury can’t run out of dollars, and giveaways to the rich are only mildly inflationary, since rich people put their money in the bank and mostly spend it on buying politicians, not goods.

But because of the delusion that currency producers like the US Treasury have the same constraints as currency users like you and me, Congress will need to come up with “Pay Fors” in future budgets to “make up for” the money they’re giving to rich people with SECURE Act 2.0. Dollars to toenail clippings, they’ll do that by hacking away at the tattered remains of the US social safety net.

Fear not, you don’t need to be a desperately poor disabled person or child to get fucked over by late additions to a 4,000 page must-pass bill! If you can afford to get on an airplane, Congress has something for you, too!

Remember when Boeing (the monopoly US airplane manufacturer that squandered $43b on stock buybacks and had to borrow $14b from the US public to survive the pandemic) told the FAA that it could self-certify its 737 Max airplanes, and then killed hundreds and hundreds of people with its defective planes?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

The 737 Max was unsafe for many reasons, but one glaring factor was the fact that Boeing sold some of its core safety as “extras” — like they were downloadable content for your Fortnite character — leading to multiple crashes in which all lives were lost:

https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-indonesia-accidents-ap-top-news-international-news-140576a8e9d4449eae646c8c479fdc3a

Boeing was forced to take the 737 Max out of service, but it eventually brought the plane back, “fixing” the problems by renaming the “737 Max” to the “737 8”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8

Supposedly, Boeing has been diligently working on fixing the problems with its defective jets that can’t be addressed by a rebranding campaign. This wasn’t voluntary: the 2020 Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act required Boeing — and every other manufacturer whose aircraft were certified by the FAA — to meet new minimum safety standards by December 27, 2022.

Every manufacturer met that deadline, except Boeing, and someone amended the budget bill to give the company three more years to meet these security standards. Critically, the new security measures, when they come, will be certified by an FAA that Republicans will control, thanks to the House changing hands.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/government-spending-bill-waives-aircraft-safety-deadline/

Boeing is slated to ship 1,000 new 737 Maxes, which will fetch $50b for the company. Many of these planes will fly directly over my house, which is on the approach path for Burbank airport. Southwest Air flies dozens of 737 Maxes right over my roof every single day.

As Facundo points out, the FAA can ill afford any more hits to its credibility. It was once the case that if the FAA certified an aircraft, every other country in the world would waive any further certification, so trusting were they of the FAA’s judgment. That is no longer the case: today, the European Aviation Safety Agency does its own aircraft testing, holding jets that enter EU airspace to a higher standard than the FAA does for US planes.

It’s just another reminder that the US doesn’t have “corporate criminals” because the US doesn’t have any meaningful enforcement for corporate crimes. In America, we love our companies like we love our billionaires: too big to fail and too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

Image: Ryan Lee (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/190784293@N05/50862532686

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Henry Wadey (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flames_%2858765896%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A living room scene, featuring a sofa in the background and a sofa in the foreground. A man's hand reaches into the frame to lift up the corner of the sofa. A broom enters the frame to sweep a pile of dirt under the rug. Mixed in with the dirt are a crashed WWI biplane with Southwest Airlines livery, and an old lady in a rocking chair.]

#pluralistic #secure 2.0 #ssi #means testing #irsleaks #fidelity #vanguard #regulatory capture #faa #retirement crisis #retirement #finance #social security #pensions #corruption #congress #aviation #boeing #737 max #must-pass #irs files

[odinsblog]

THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT (FRA), which passed the House yesterday, makes several changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes known as food stamps). The changes would deliver Republicans a long-sought policy goal to extend one of the program’s two work requirements, which will now be imposed on older, able-bodied, childless adults aged 50 to 54. But President Biden is selling his caucus on the idea that he actually outfoxed Republicans on the deal, by pointing to exemptions from this work requirement granted to three vulnerable populations: homeless individuals, veterans, and young people recently out of foster care.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office sided with Biden’s version of the argument. CBO estimates that the deal on the whole would actually raise SNAP participation by 78,000, leading to a slight increase (about $2.1 billion over ten years) in spending. This has triggered gloating by Democratic partisans, who believe the right-wing effort to deny food to impoverished people has been neutralized.

In the near term, the CBO score may cause more upheaval among Republicans intent on slashing funding on social programs. But it’s also a misleading evaluation of how SNAP is administered, according to anti-hunger organizations that handle outreach to the program’s users.

These organizations question many of the theoretical assumptions made by CBO in scoring the food aid provisions, which fail to take into account the reality of implementing these new policies. They instead argue that the work requirements on older Americans will lead to the largest restrictions on SNAP since welfare reform in 1996, while the exemptions fail to account for long-standing barriers to including disadvantaged populations in SNAP. Without additional funding for the withered administrative capacity at state and local agencies, many of these groups will likely not be able to participate.

"We have far more certainty about what the impacts will be of the punitive measure in the bill than we do about the potential exemptions," said Ellen Vollinger, the SNAP program director at the Food Research and Action Center.

The able-bodied work requirement creates a time limit for nutrition assistance of a maximum of three months over a three-year period for those who do not qualify. Research has shown that this policy is a crude tool that mostly kicks people off SNAP rather than promoting greater labor market participation.

In other words, SNAP is not designed to be a jobs program.

(continue reading)

#politics #means testing #republicans #snap #food assistance #food stamps #fiscal responsibility act #tanf #work requirements #cbo #the fiscal responsibility act #fra #neoliberalism #clintonism

[tenth-sentence]

Jean Edmonds in Liverpool remembered 'the neighbouring family being visited by a means test inspector on the eve of their baby son's funeral and told they would have to pawn the table under the coffin, before they could qualify for unemployment relief'.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

#book quote #normal women #philippa gregory #nonfiction #jean edmonds #memory #liverpool #neighbors #means testing #inspector #funeral #death #pawn #table #coffin #qualifying #unemployment benefits

[firespirited]

Regarding means testing so as not to allow a small amount of rich kids to get college, healthcare and other social benefits.

You guys do know that freeing rich kids from the gilded cage means they’re more likely to meet new people and not become their parents? not be beholden to hoarding the family fortune and making the life/investment/voting choices required of Tycoon-McSnoberton the third? Some rich kids are ride or die for the money no matter what but others will take any chance to make their own choices and in the process, become actual human beings like the rest of us if they’re given the option of breaking the strings attached to the fortune.

#saf #any idea how hard it is for me to be compassionate about people born filthy rich? #lmao #means testing

[leo-fie]

Don't let the jokes along the lines of "Oh, you want my firstborn too?" fool you.

The amount of information social security wants from you, including all your contracts and deeds, everything you own and all your bank statements, year after year even if nothing changed, is an horrific invasion of privacy.

Means testing is not a good thing.

The logic of only giving to the deserving is inherently inhumane because it implies that people who are bad at paperwork don't deserve to live.

Means testing is often more expensive than if the state just gave to everyone.

It is designed to stress you out and grind you down, so you give up and go back to work. Neoliberal capitalism doesn't work without a substantial amount of desperate unemployed people, it can't have a functioning social welfare system.

#social security #government bureaucracy #capitalism #means testing

[tawaifeddiediaz]

you know what boils my blood.

over the last 2 weeks, i've seen countless patients walk into my urgent care center, symptomatic for so many things, refusing to get tested for covid and flu, citing that they don't want to knowingly bring it to their holiday tables. i had a patient tell me, verbatim, "i don't want to test for covid, because i don't want to be the asshole who brings it on a plane."

i understand that - i understand that holidays are times where people look forward to meeting loved ones that they might only see once a year, or where they get a break from the hectic back and forth of their lives.

but here's the thing - whether they get tested or not, they will bring whatever they have to their holiday tables. it's pure recklessness to know that you're sick, and walk into someone else's house spreading the disease.

today, january 2, i saw 91 patients, many of them who have tested positive for covid and flu. many of these patients are the same ones who didn't want testing 3 days ago, until their events were over, and now, they will have to reach out to everyone they know to let them know that they were positive because they were showing symptoms well before their event.

the next week or two? we're going to see many, many more, all people with symptoms that started around christmas. these are the only two viruses we test for rapidly in our office, but they are potent and can be fatal in many people.

so here's why i wrote this post, and maybe it's a little late, but - if you care about your loved ones, please get tested if you know you're sick. it doesn't have to be at a clinic if you don't want it to, because the over-the-counter tests work just fine too (if you test within 5-7 days of symptom onset). just...please don't try to run from the knowledge that you might have covid, because immunocompromised people, elderly people, people with co-morbidities like asthma, pregnancy, diabetes, etc...many of them may not recover. and they may not be sitting at your holiday table in the future because of it.

#zee rambles #this isn't to guilt trip anyone #but im so so tired of people coming in and just refusing testing because they want to see grandma or whatever #and on top of that people are avoiding vaccinations and all that too?? #we all lived through the pandemic - everyone saw how many people unfortunately passed away from it #now because of vaccinations and some amount of herd immunity we're finding milder cases in healthy people #but that doesn't mean its gone #that doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term repercussions even in healthy people and that doesn't mean people aren't still dying from it #honestly i just needed a lil rant #and if this helps at least one person??? im all for it #also i can't sleep so here we are spilling thoughts into the voidddd

[uncarving-the-block]

#things I sent my Republican parents #sociology #economics #means testing #my life #austerity

[egophiliac]

so excited for Kalim to save the day by swiper-no-swiping this dip. you can do it! I believe in you!

god I hope this reads properly

#art #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland spoilers #stage in playful land #stage in playfulland #i feel like kalim and the marshmallow test operates under roger rabbit rules #whether he passes or fails depends on which option is funniest at the time #anyway HEY things are finally actually happening! #so glad fellow agrees with me there #did he even expect them to make it to the show. did he very quickly have to choreograph a poppy little dance number. #honestly in retrospect i am also shocked that they lasted as long as they did #i mean. floyd is there. c'mon. #speaking of which i did really enjoy floyd going BYE JADE! MAYBE I'LL COME BACK TO SAVE YOU LATER IF I FEEL LIKE IT! #revenge for the popcorn #sorry if this is nonsensical! somehow it became like 4 am while i wasn't looking #i am super digging the evil theme park shenanigans (now that they're actually happening) #it's just Very Late!

[uncanny-tranny]

To any disabled person undergoing tests to find What's Wrong: I hope your results come back the way you hope and that you receive the help you need. I hope you are not denied care, I hope you are taken seriously even after this, and I hope that you will be taken care of compassionately

#disability #currently going through something like this for myself and while i doubt there's anything 'wrong' i still did it #people are always weird about people who are disappointed or devastated about 'normal results' but... #...it's because normal results don't mean much when you still have the issue at hand... #...if my test came back that my back is physically normal that doesn't indicate that i don't have back pain does it? #because i am still in pain so often even if i have a 'physically normal' back... #...just as an example but i don't think a lot of abled people 'get it' #also like... if your tests are coming back 'normal' every time that might give your care providers pause... #...and they might just start infantilizing you or treating you like a hypochondriac... #...'are you SURE [problem] isn't just anxiety?' 'are you SURE you're actually experiencing [x] or are you exaggerating it?'

[possiblyawesometmblr]

seeing a lot of people focusing on the cute stuff in the update and that's all well and good but hi what the fuck does this mean

#you throw the child so hard it goes through the roof. +10 relationship #no but seriously what the FUCK does it mean eric #i don't have any saves with babies right now i can't test this shit #stardew valley #stardew valley 1.6

[unearthlydust]

Ed Teach + tied-up hair

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

#ofmdedit #our flag means death #ofmd #taika waititi #edward teach #ofmd spoilers #gnhhh his hair #tvedit #testing' #*

[cringefailcabitha]

I come bearing gifs,

#inanimate insanity #inanimate insanity invitational #ii cabby #ii test tube #ii fan #one thing about these guys is they like to point #and they like to talk at people #and I do mean ‘at’ and not only ‘with’