Comment by danaris
4 hours ago
And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.
It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
Absolutely True.
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.