Here’s a story with a happy ending. Almost.
It began last month, when Congress and the squatter currently occupying the White House signed a law sending stimulus payments to all of us regular citizens who have been hit hard financially by this damn pandemic.
There was just one problem: This action pretty much left out those most in need of stimulation.
Now is the time for all of us on the non-receiving end of the government’s idiocy to stand together—even those of us who can’t stand.
I’m talking about disabled people whose main and probably only income is Social Security Supplemental Income (SSI). They are among the poorest of the poor. The maximum monthly SSI payment for an unmarried individual is $783. Try living on that.
The original stimulus legislation called for most working class Americans to be stimulated to the tune of about $1,200 each. All they had to do was check their bank accounts. The money was to be deposited into the accounts to which their 2018 or 2019 federal tax refunds were sent.
The legislation designated that people receiving SSI would also get the same $1,200 infusion. That’s a helluva lot of stimulus when you live on no more than $783. But, of course, there was a catch: This money was also to be sent to the bank accounts associated with the recipients’ tax returns. And people who receive SSI usually don’t file tax returns because their income isn’t taxable.
That meant the folks on SSI would have to go through the needless step of filing a tax return. This seemed like an absurd requirement, considering the federal government figures out a way to send out millions of SSI payments every month. Why not just send out the stimulus payments in a similar way?
Maybe that made too much sense. I don’t know.
Here’s the good news: On April 15, the Social Security Administration announced that SSI recipients will get their payments sent directly to them without having to do anything extra to trigger the process. Now they can take that money and do wild and crazy things, like buy food and pay rent.
That’s how it should have been all along. Who knows why the process was so convoluted in the first place? You know how some lawmakers are when it comes to giving poor people money. They feel they have to make them do tricks for it, like a dog dancing on its hind legs for a treat.
The rules were changed because a whole lot of disabled folks and those who care about us spoke up about it. More than 200 organizations sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that said: “Forcing millions of low-income senior citizens and people with disabilities, many of them veterans, to file tax returns when they are not otherwise required to do so will delay access to their recovery rebates and place a huge burden on the providers of disability and low-income tax preparation services.”
So even though we can’t exactly take to the streets in protest these days, disabled folks still had enough political infrastructure and clout to raise a successful stink. To me, that’s the happy ending.
But the letter was also addressed to Robert Wilkie, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, because the stimulus legislation said disabled military veterans receiving Disability Compensation and Veterans Pension benefits from the Veterans Administration would also have their stimulus payments deposited into the bank accounts associated with their tax returns. But that income isn’t taxable either.
The letter noted that when government economic stimulus payments were issued in 2008, 17 percent of those who were eligible to receive payments didn’t get them because they didn’t file tax returns.
So far, there’s been no announcement that these vets will also get direct payments. So it’s not a totally happy ending yet until we fix this for them, too.
Now is the time for all of us on the non-receiving end of the government’s idiocy to stand together—even those of us who can’t stand.