In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.
It doesn’t matter what it’s for.
You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?
For college?
To put a downpayment on a house?
Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?
Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.
And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.
So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.
“What if I spend the money that day?”
Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.
And yes, this system literally kills people.
Remember when “Guardians of the Galaxy” came out? one of Rocket Racoon’s creators, Bill Mantlo, suffered an accident in 1992 and has irreparable brain damage.
before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.
Bill Mantlo’s brother had to come out and explain: If Marvel gave them monetary aid, Bill Mantlo would lose his financial assistance.
That’s so utterly depressing.
disgusting
I have friends on welfare who won’t pick up a penny in the street because they’d risk the welfare they struggled to get for 10 years.
oh look another fucked up thing in this world. let’s just add it to the list. number 63858b
My brother has been on California State SSI for autism for the last 10 years, and he absolutely has to (no joke, HAS TO) spend all 720 bucks of his SSI every month, because if he puts it in the bank he risks losing his SSI altogether.
Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.
And here’s the funnest part of the story!
One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.
The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.
He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.
Please, legal side of Tumblr, tell me what positive reasoning this law has?
Happy 4th of July everyone! This is what the “nation of opportunity” looks like.
There’s something called an ABLE account that can help. If you are on SSI and were diagnosed as disabled before the age of 26 you can apply for an ABLE account that will allow you to save up to $99,000. More people need to know about this!
thank you so much for this information. i’m applying for an abled account right now
THERES A WHAT
OH GOD BLESS THE SHIT OUTTA YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FREAKED OUT OVER THIS I WAS
I’ve been looking into SSI; I had no idea about this!
Here’s the link to the National ABLE organization. It has information on how to apply for an account and lots of super useful info (like that you can apply for an ABLE account in a state you DON’T live in if that state’s program meets your needs better.
Wealthy suburbs are paid for by poor neighbourhoods.
Suburbia promises the best of both worlds - you get city levels of infrastructure, with rural levels of space. It’s like glamping - you get to roleplay living on a farmstead, while also not needing to have a septic tank. In reality, though, city infrastructure is expensive, especially to maintain, and these suburbs produce functionally zero value.
In an actual rural area, there’s farmland, producing value. In a city, with shops and workplaces alongside housing, there’s value produced. In suburbia, there’s just housing - and extremely low-density housing, at that. A mile of road, underground electrical cables, and sewer lines cost the same whether they’re in a city center, or in the middle of an empty street, leading to a six-house cul-de-sac. To actually support this amount of infrastructure, serving so few people, with so little actual city revenue, property taxes would have to exceed median income - i.e., it’s unsustainable.
To illustrate, here are the costs of services compared to city revenue, per acre, in Lafayette, with net positive in grey, net negative in red, as well as the average costs of different land use by area, in Eugene:
ALT
In short, these wealthier suburbs are a net drain on city economies, as they produce no value, but require exorbitant amounts of infrastructure and maintenance. In fact, these areas are functionally subsidised by the rest of the city, especially by higher-density, mixed-use neighbourhoods, which produce significantly more value for the same amount of city infrastructure. Poorer, urban neighbourhoods subsidise wealthy suburban neighbourhoods - and, despite being unsustainable, it remains literally illegal in most of the US to build anything but low-density single-family homes, due to car-centric zoning laws.
ALT
These suburbs are subsidised by the rest of the city, especially high-density mixed-use neighbourhoods, which produce significantly more value for the same amount of city infrastructure. Poorer, urban neighbourhoods subsidise wealthy suburban neighbourhoods, which are unsustainable - but it remains literally illegal in most of the US to build anything but low-density single-family homes, due to car-centric zoning laws.
Where it is legal to build anything else, including medium-density or mixed-use developments (as is the norm in the rest of the world), car-centric requirements for minimum parking, street setback, and minimum lot sizes make it infeasible, and again pigeonhole development into wide, flat areas of asphalt only traversible by car.
This is a new development, by the way - US cities didn’t used to be like this, they were, actually, similar to cities in the rest of the world. It was a fairly recent development, that medium-density, mixed-use, walkable cities in the US were demolished, to build car-dependent sprawls.
ALT
ALT
You might notice that the majority of the land use here is parking lots. These parking lots, taking as much infrastructure and maintenance from the city as an actual neighbourhood with shops, homes, and workplaces, produce… nothing, except making it impossible to get anywhere except by car. When everything is spread out, with nothing but a mile of unshaded pavement between you and the nearest shop, of course you’d drive. When everyone drives, and the city’s full of polluting, noisy cars, of course you wouldn’t want to live there, and only visit in an enclosed, soundproofed box.
Other countries have gone down the same path of car-dependent development, and have been able to reverse course. Changing zoning to allow mixed-use is possible. City streets need to be torn up regularly anyway, and can simply be modernised when they’re put back in. Amsterdam in the 70s was a nightmare of traffic and car accidents, and now it’s one of the safest and most convenient places to walk, cycle, take the tram, or otherwise not have to drive. There are still suburbs, but there isn’t suburbia.
All that’s missing is political will - and as long as oil companies control the government, and some jackass car company owner can get your high-speed rail cancelled, then it’s not gonna happen. But it can.
So the thousands and thousands of dollars paid by those that live in the suburbs don’t count?
I know the shops and restaurants in the urban areas bring in tax money, as do the real estate taxes, but the amount brought in barely, or does not even cover democrats poor policies. Most cities are Democrat controlled…
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
