America is weird in that the poorest get significantly more benefits than the merely lower-middle class. And the majority of Americans pay no federal tax after EITC and other refunds.
You can get SNAP (free food), Section 8 (free housing), Medicaid (healthcare, CHIP for kids is easier than adults, but still many people get it), and if you manage to raise smart kids despite poverty they will get college for free as well (most highly-selective universities are free for the poor, but extremely expensive for even the middle class).
I own a lot of rental property and I have a Section 8 tenant who has never worked, completely gamed the system with a subjective disability that renders her unable to ever hold a job (supposedly). A good tenant but is constantly trying to give away tons of food she buys because she always tries to spend the SNAP she gets every month. And she gets free heat, and electricity, and public transportation pass, and on and on.
What a weird take: I'd definitely expect the poorest/sickest to get the most additional benefits of all, the middle to get none and the top to get charged extra to cover up.
If you're middle class, that should be the average and that means you only get things which are the foundation of the system covered by the taxes.
Let me elucidate why this system kind of sucks, as someone else who knows someone personally who lives a "full benefits" poverty life.
These benefits are binary, not tiered, so once you earn a dollar over the incredibly low threshold, they vanish. So the person I know cannot get a job and work, because if they earn over ~$16k in a year all the benefits go away. And where she lives you need about $50k/yr minimum to scrape by. So there is this $34k/yr gap which creates a no-mans land of livelihood.
In addition to income, there are extremely low "wealth" qualifiers. You cannot save money while on most of these programs to try to improve your situation or build a personal safety net. If you manage to save more than a couple thousand dollars, you become ineligible for benefits.
> So there is this $34k/yr gap which creates a no-mans land of livelihood.
it also creates/necessitates a vast enforcement bureaucracy to make it all "work" which in itself is a huge waste when you could just tax it back from high-earners at the end of the tax year... its almost as if it was designed to suck
The problem with these discussions is the errant use of poor/middle/upper/top as class identifiers.
The more useful identifiers would be roughly young and/or working, and old and/or non working. The latter category also covers the beneficiaries of wealthy people (who are among the old and/or non working).
The USA (and many countries, especially democracies) has a situation where your expected quality of life is lower (or not sufficiently higher) for the young and working than the young and non working for those not lucky enough to be born to the right families or prudent enough to make the right choices in school, etc.
The incentives should always be such that expected quality of life is always greater for those working than non working.
Note that this is a different topic than whatever the floor for quality of life should be.
You are saying this with completely forgetting that the vast majority of the people who are old and non working are in fact, retired, sick, on medicaid, and generally just not that great at working in the first place because they already (most of the time) spent 40+ years working.
Why would the person who spent 40+ years working have a worse quality of life than someone whose spent 10 years working? The incentives you put up basically say "as soon as you are done we're sending you to the glue factory."
> The incentives you put up basically say "as soon as you are done we're sending you to the glue factory."
Those are the incentives nature puts up.
>Why would the person who spent 40+ years working have a worse quality of life than someone whose spent 10 years working?
Depends how much they earned and saved. Current workers (proxy for young) know they will not have a quality of life as good as those that have already worked decades past, so where is their incentive?
>because they already (most of the time) spent 40+ years working.
But they (at least these first few generations) are receiving healthcare worth far more than the work they did, tenable only due to the higher total fertility rates of many decades ago.
At its root, these deferred benefit schemes were either never sustainable for modern lifespans and healthcare consumption, or they depended on unrealistically high total fertility rates. One could even say they played a role in causing lower total fertility rates, as society de-coupled raising one's own productive children and having a good quality of life post working age, since you could now depend on others' productive children.
Money, savings, and other wealth abstractions that legislators can easily bring about don't materialize the goods and services one might want to buy.
The whole point of retirement saving is so that you can still support yourself after your mind and body can. Just about everyone is aware of this, yet many still save nothing because "society will deal with it" when they get older.
When I was younger I had an easy time buying into "everything is too expensive to save money", now that I am older, past the "you must start saving now" age, I know way way too many people who don't save for retirement and live stupidly beyond their means.
"We don't have any retirement savings because how could we give up eating out 1-2 times a week, $250 monthly beauty appointments, $90 gym membership (they have clean warm towels!), and our annual Disney vacation and our family Lake Tahoe trip. And no way will you catch me in a 5 yr old used car, sorry I cannot sacrifice my new car leases!"
I know so many more people who recklessly spend money than people who honestly are trying but cannot make it.
The US has a weird class stratification system, that some people think has been embedded into society dating back to the Calvinist New England and slaveholding days.
It's developed since then in interesting ways and shows up everywhere. The biggest thing is that each cohort looks down on those "beneath" them. This manifests in different ways... people living in public housing, getting housing and typically SNAP benefits, will often scoff at people collecting temporary assistance (cash) as loafers.
If you're looking at families, the prevailing rent in Onondaga County, NY (Syracuse) is $1475 for a two-bedroom apartment. "Prevailing" rent is the metric used for Section 8 is essentially the price floor for an adequate apartment. The median household income in the county is $74,000, which is 23% rent to income ratio, so pretty good, right? (Keep in mind, this is from a not so great apartment that passes Section 8 inspection, but little else) Eh, not really, the well-off suburbs skew the statistic... if you look at the City of Syracuse, more representative of the blue collar working class and poor, the median income is $45,500 -- 39% rent to income. The median household in the city requires some support to live -- in Syracuse that's like 70,000 people
As you see purchasing power decline for working people, traditional "middle class" respectable jobs are falling off the ladder in terms of livability. A parent in a 90% of retail and semi-skilled labor jobs is making $80-90k max, and is basically a car disaster away from financial ruin. Many, many of these people are stuck with non-dischargeable student debt for life as well.
through my eyes i see a similar implication to disproprortionate judicial punishment - aspects of a hegemonic system designed to suppress individual voices. for example, pirates in the UK being handed jail terms of greater duration than those given to individuals having killed other humans - people daring to go against the powerful have their lives taken away from them, whereas infighting within the working class is almost encouraged by miniscule sentencing.
or in this case, why bother putting any effort into life when doing nothing provides a greater reward? why attempt to make something of oneself at the risk of losing everything forever?
all in all, whether or not intentionally curated, these societal facets serve to foment an atmosphere of fear - individuals are forced to exist either in ignorance, or otherwise must live with the knowledge that minor infractions may end one's dreams, while concurrently one's dreams may be ended at any time for no reason but the whim of another.
such a dichotomy between ignorance and fear effectively suppresses societal change, which if it were to happen anyway, would be instantly detected by automated surveillance, and promptly quashed under fully legal pretences. but that's not even necessary. the populace is already addicted to living vicariously through screens (now from birth thanks to parents being forced to devote energy to work instead of their children).
The say you write about it, being poor in America is easy and great. And then you look at powerty in America and see hopeless desperate people with no access to justice,lite chances in life, little access to healthcare and raising homelessness on top of it.
And funny enough, the poor are just about to loose their healthcare and food stamps via big beautiful bill. Which is official name of that bill.
You can get SNAP (free food), Section 8 (free housing), Medicaid (healthcare, CHIP for kids is easier than adults, but still many people get it), and if you manage to raise smart kids despite poverty they will get college for free as well (most highly-selective universities are free for the poor, but extremely expensive for even the middle class).
I own a lot of rental property and I have a Section 8 tenant who has never worked, completely gamed the system with a subjective disability that renders her unable to ever hold a job (supposedly). A good tenant but is constantly trying to give away tons of food she buys because she always tries to spend the SNAP she gets every month. And she gets free heat, and electricity, and public transportation pass, and on and on.