There are about eight million people in the United States who aren’t allowed to have a monthly income higher than $794. If their income goes above that amount, they can be severely punished by the federal government.
These are the people whose incomes come from SSI, which stands for Supplemental Security Income. It’s a program where disabled people and people aged sixty-five or older can receive a monthly check from the federal government. But to qualify for SSI, they must be very poor, and the rules are designed to keep them that way.
I’ve known lots of disabled people throughout the years who live on SSI, and I still don’t know how they make it.
The maximum monthly SSI payment is $794 for an individual. The average payment is $585. The funny thing about it is, when Congress passed the law creating the SSI program in 1972, the stated purpose was “to provide a positive assurance that the nation’s aged, blind, and disabled people would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.”
But strictly maintaining such a paltry payment ceiling assures that anyone relying on SSI has no choice but to subsist on an income far below the federal poverty level, which is currently defined as $1,073 a month for individuals.
I’ve known lots of disabled people throughout the years who live on SSI, and I still don’t know how they make it. If they have an apartment, it’s probably subsidized, so the government pays the majority of their rent. If you can find even a tiny apartment to rent for $794 these days, you won’t have any money left for food and such.
Some people in this predicament may live with friends or relatives. Or maybe they scare up side hustles to bring in a little extra cash. But if you’re receiving SSI, you have to be careful about employing survival strategies as bold as these, or your meager income may get further reduced or even eliminated.
If you have more than $20 a month in unearned income from a source such as a pension, you’re supposed to report that to the Social Security Administration so the amount can be deducted from your SSI payment. If you earn more than $65 a month from a side job or something, fifty cents of every dollar are supposed to be deducted from your payment.
Even if you receive in-kind support from another person, such as free rent or even a bag of groceries, the rules say this is supposed to be reported so the recipient’s payment can be docked accordingly.
Forget about putting away a little rainy-day nest egg. If you’re collecting SSI, you can’t have assets valued above $2,000. The asset limit for a married couple is $3,000.
And don’t go thinking that you can squeeze a few extra bucks out of the system if you marry someone who also receives SSI and thus double your income. Signing up for SSI comes with a stiff marriage penalty: The most a married couple who both receive SSI can collect is $1,191 a month. That’s $397 less than the maximum for two individuals.
These brutally nitpicky rules aren’t merely theoretical. Real people have been stung by them. Disabled SSI recipient Art Pronin wrote in a recent op-ed that, in 2014, the Social Security Administration informed him that his bank account balance was $3 more than the asset limit. He wrote, “For over six months, I fought to stop the government from taking away my benefits.”
If you’re trying to get by on SSI, the rules have you stuck at pretty much every turn, so you end up trying to find creative ways to stretch your money, like maybe rationing toilet paper.
Pronin says he appealed to an administrative law judge who found that he never exceeded the $2,000 asset limit and that the government had made an error. So he didn’t lose his SSI, but he endured a lot of intense stress. Pronin called the SSI restrictions “outdated, complicated, and needlessly cruel.”
If you’re trying to get by on SSI, the rules have you stuck at pretty much every turn, so you end up trying to find creative ways to stretch your money, like maybe rationing toilet paper.
As oppressive as these rules are, Congress seems to like them that way, because it has done very little to update them. The earnings limit hasn’t increased since 1972 and the asset limit has stayed the same since 1989.
In 2013, Representative Raúl Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, introduced the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act. The bill sought to increase the asset limit for SSI recipients up to $10,000 for an individual and $15,000 for a married couple.
That bill died with a whimper in committee. So Grijalva introduced similar bills by the same name in 2015, 2017, and 2019. Those bills didn’t go anywhere either. It didn’t matter if Republicans or Democrats were the majority party in the House; they all died just the same.
Now the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act of 2021 awaits the attention of the House and Senate. The lead sponsor of the Senate version is Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. This bill would raise the SSI asset limit to $10,000 for an individual and $20,000 for a married couple. Recipients could earn up to $399 monthly with no penalty and get as much as $123 per month in unearned income.
Those silly restrictions on in-kind support would be eliminated, as would the marriage penalty. Each person would still get whatever amount they were getting from SSI before they married. And the legislation raises the maximum payment to equal the federal poverty level.
Such a deal.
When Joe Biden was running for President in 2020, he released a disability platform that was extensive and well received by disability activists. In it, he expressed support for elements that now appear in the SSI Restoration Act, such as raising the asset and payment limits.
The idea of changing the SSI rules to make them more fair also appears to have hefty bipartisan public support. Last May, Data for Progress and the Century Foundation released results of polling that showed significant majorities of potential voters believe the key features of the SSI Restoration Act are a good idea.
For instance, 79 percent of the 1,250 likely voters surveyed (including 70 percent of the Republicans) said they were in favor of increasing the SSI payment limit to match the federal poverty level. And 64 percent (including 55 percent of Republicans) said they support eliminating SSI asset limits altogether, which is even beyond what the legislation proposes.
The Senate bill also has the endorsement of some heavy-hitting organizations, such as AARP, AFL-CIO, and even the United Auto Workers.
Will any of this make any difference this time around? I’m skeptical. Some members of Congress don’t really care about the people whose lives would be improved by these highly necessary and long overdue improvements. But they’re afraid to say that out loud, so they do nothing and ignore the SSI Restoration Act into oblivion.
But let’s not forget that enforcing all the punitive rules of SSI also costs a lot of money. Even though SSI accounts for only 5 percent of the benefits distributed by the Social Security Administration, it consumes 35 percent of the agency’s budget.
It takes a lot of people and paperwork to go through the mechanics of monitoring the status of recipients and docking them if they exceed any of the many harsh limits. Cutting back on all that is bound to save some money. How much time and money must the Social Security Administration have spent hassling Art Pronin over $3?
What needs to change most is how disability support programs like SSI are viewed and framed. Being disabled is expensive. Disabled people can’t live without a lot of pricey goods and services, like wheelchairs and ventilators and paying people to assist us in our homes. Essential stuff like our homes, vehicles, and even clothes often have to be custom designed or modified. We have more expensive medical needs. And so on and so forth. This places us at an automatic economic disadvantage.
We must have access to special types of goods and services before we can even step up to the starting line alongside everybody else. Otherwise, we get left behind. Programs like SSI that relieve us of some of these economic burdens aren’t preferential treatment. They are an indispensable means of achieving equity. To reach that goal, these programs must be flexible and generous.
Well, there is one bit of good news to report: In October, the Social Security Administration announced that all Social Security payments, including SSI, will go up by 5.9 percent in 2022. That’s because, by law, Social Security payment rates can (and usually do) increase annually in accordance with the inflation rate as determined by the Consumer Price Index.
This will be the largest SSI raise since 1982. It drives the SSI maximum monthly payment all the way up to $841 for individuals and $1,261 for couples.
So maybe, if Congress ignores the SSI Restoration Act once again, people living on SSI won’t have to ration toilet paper quite as much. Or maybe they still will, because of the increased cost of toilet paper.