Here's An Extra $25 A Week — Whoops, Now You Don't Qualify For Food Stamps
The economic recovery plan includes a nice little $25 a week bump for unemployed folks — but for some it comes with a catch — they no longer qualify for hundreds of dollars a month in food stamp benefits. Whoopsies!
It seems that when the government raised the unemployment benefits — they forgot to raise the income cap for food stamp eligibility — and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
From the AP:
The Georgia Department of Human Resources explained in a letter to [a recently laid off citizen] last month that, because of the stimulus, he was ineligible for food stamps. He now makes $1,538 a month - $21 too much for a family of two to qualify.
"We have to pay him that $25 a week," said Brenda Brown, assistant commissioner at the Georgia Department of Labor. "And he doesn't have the option not to accept it."
He's missing out on about $300 a month in food stamp benefits, and is now going to food pantries and has stopped paying his mortgage.
There are currently about 32.5 million people on food stamps according to the article.
STIMULUS WATCH: $25 check may cost you food stamps [Yahoo!] (Thanks, Pamela!)
(Photo:JimmyBionic)
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Comments:
Just to save someone else the time...
[Insert self-righteous comment about how all individuals on food stamps/welfare/assistance are lazy/greedy/minorities. It should generally be lacking in proper spelling/grammar/logic.]
What a rip, he shoulda had the choice... Then again what would you choose between and extra $25 in cash or $300 in food stamps. I know everyone would pick the foodstamps...
The Georgia Department of Human Resources needs to reevaluate things...
@billbobbins: Ladies and gentlemen! First post is also the first blame the OP post!
Who are you to say this person uses his money for cigarettes and lottery tickets? Where do you live that you think you're so high and mighty? Lets make stereotypical jokes about where you live.
The average income in Marietta, Georgia is a little over $45,000. This man is making a little under $18,500. Who are YOU to say that he is making too much and doesn't need food stamps?
Could he increase his tax deductions to compensate?
@pecan 3.14159265: Agreed. And this is a family of two. I made about that much last year (grad school) and I couldn't imagine supporting another person...
Oh how I wish people wouldn't respond to billbobbins the troll... but he'll get at least two dozen responses.
The bump in unemployment benefits is really not relevant here. The problem is that the food stamp program shouldn't have a line that when crossed will instantly eliminate hundreds of dollars of benefits. The line could be crossed by an increase in pay just as easily as by an increase in government benefits, and either way that's not the way it should be. There should not be a situation where making more money leaves you with less money. Food stamps should phase out gradually as a percentage of your income above some threshold, so that you'd always be better off making more money.
Side note: I know a lot of people think that making more money could leave you with less take-home pay because of tax brackets, but that's not true. Google marginal tax rate. There are some situations where making more money could leave you with less after taxes, but they don't affect most people.
He should hire someone to watch his kids for $25 and count that as an expense, then his _net_ income will fall below once again. (no kids? then some other expense that he can attribute to employment hunting, its NET not GROSS!)
@pecan 3.14159265: There is a vast difference in cost of living in Marietta versus a very rural area like Colquitt where Median household income is 27,105
@pecan 3.14159265: A normal salary has taxes. This man is making the same as someone earning 30k a year.
@Galactica: That is probably his income before taxes. Otherwise, everyone and their brother could increase their tax deductions to qualify for assistance programs, then get a big refund the next spring.
@billbobbins: Well, maybe. On the other hand, if he's supporting a spouse, several kids, and perhaps an ailing/elderly parent, the $1500 doesn't go nearly as far.
Seriously, how far does less than $400 really go anywhere in this country?
@mmmsoap: The article says it's a family of 2. So unless his wife is disabled and unable to work, she should be bringing in income. Even if she is bring in the same thing, $3000 a month should be plenty to live off of (assuming you're not in a high cost-of-living area like NYC or something.)
@dangermike:
Suck at what? Being poor? Seems they're pretty darn good at being poor, I think they suck at being well, NOT poor.
@katstermonster:
Kudos to you for playing the minority/race card without anyone bringing minorities/race into the discussion. Didn't you get the memo that we're suppose to wait until someone mentions color before we scream prejudice?
@Corporate_guy: In Georgia, unemployment benefits are taxable.
From the Georgia Department of Labor website:
Unemployment compensation is taxable income and must be reported yearly even if benefits received have been repaid.
That is an excellent point. People often talk about how there has to be a line somewhere, but if it's a gradual slope rather than a sudden cut-off the impact will be much less substantial (and people will be more willing to work!).
Also I think it was Germany that decided to put "stimulus" money towards kickbacks for businesses for hiring and training people that would otherwise be unqualified. They stopped extending the length of time you could draw unemployment (in fact I think they may have shortened it) and unemployment levels went down dramatically. I think that system could go a long way in the US.
I am sad that I make less than that at an 11$/hour job working my ass off. FML
The thing that gets ma about this article is that Congress knew this was going to happen but decided it was too expensive to reprogram computer systems to stop it.
Yay for congress saving money!
Is this the state government mucking with the Federal one?
If so, I hope Georgia sinks halfway into the Atlantic taking the firstborn of every elite's family into the silt-mired abyss, Old Testament style. Because Baby Jesus does not approve.
What kind of heartless ass would prey on unemployed workers struck down by the worst jobs environment since the Great Depression by literally stealing food from their mouths? Oh, Conservative Southern ones: asked & answered.
I'm rather shocked the local pols didn't also send out a helpful flier explaining that, for struggling families with multiple children slowly starving, an amputated child limb makes an excellent base upon which to get a good soup stock going. If their Lord & Savior can't approve, at least Jonathan Swift might.
@Trai_Dep: Um. What? The federal government passed a law that had an unintended side effect - which the government was aware may happen. The stimulus bill did not include a provision to increase the income bar so many people are now going over the limit and are not getting their food stamp coverage. State officials just caught onto the fact that this was happening, but apparently the federal government knew it could happen and decided not to remedy it before passing it.
From the article:
Under the economic recovery plan, laid-off workers have seen a $25 weekly bump in their unemployment checks as part of a broad expansion of benefits for the poor. But the law did not raise the income cap for food stamp eligibility, so the extra money has pushed some people over the limit.Laid-off workers and state officials are only now realizing the quirk, a consequence of pushing a $787 billion, 400-page bill through Congress and into law in three weeks.
Lawmakers crafting the stimulus knew this would become a problem, said Stacy Dean, director of food assistance policy at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. They could have headed it off by raising the income tax or declaring that the $25 stimulus checks would not affect food stamp eligibility. Both were expensive options that could have forced states to reprogram their computer systems.But more importantly, hashing out those details would have taken time.
"People were aware of this but, as you recall, the stimulus was moving along and then it was passed in about a day," Dean said. "There was not a lot of policy discussion on this."
I'm not getting your whole deal about Southern Conservatives doing anything to prey on the unemployed workers of Georgia.
I am sure they will be able to run socialist health care with out anything like this happening.
@Cant_stop_the_rock: While imminently reasonable and well thought, your plan suffers from one major flaw: Conservatives exist to punish working people (err, to give both opposing sides equal billing, RedStaters can substitute this phrase with "saving from filthy Communism"), not to rationally run a program to assist former workers who've paid into Unemployment Insurance their entire working lives.
But I'm sure the guys assaulting struggling families' children attend church each and every week, so it more than balances out.
@pecan 3.14159265: Ii've got friends in Marietta, we often spend the weekend there. However, we live 90 minutes away, down I20, Wife works in Athens. 2 years ago, wife made $16,000 and that was for a family of 5. We didn't need food stamps, did just fine, TYVM, but we're living in a rural area. If you're outside the core Atlanta metro area, you can quite easily live on $18k/year for a family of two. It's the big question of 'where'. And frankly, if you're in an expensive area, move to a cheaper one if you can.
However, Ga food stamps are messed up anyway. I've known people on them, and the amount will change month by month. One month it will be $350, the next will be $200. They won't ever tell you why it changes, except for a piece of paper with cryptic codes on it.
Of course, it's better than Child Support, who flat out ignore the support orders (and even court orders, judgments and warrants) they're supposed to enforce (took us 4 months to get them to file the incarceration order request for failure of my wife's ex to stick to the terms of last summers contempt hearing. Warrant's been sitting in the Sherrif's office now since the start of April - and him not paying isn't a surprise, this case is almost 10 years old!
@Trai_Dep: Maybe Can't_stop_the_rock's thoughts are reasonable and well thought, your railing against Conservatives who "exist to punish working people" is ridiculous. While the current governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, is Republican, before him, Georgia hadn't had a Republican governor since 1871. Yeah, you can have conservative Democrats, but it doesn't mean that Georgia's out to destroy people's lives.
The REAL problem here is that government programs like food stamps have "hard cutoffs". Instead, they should have "graduated reduction". The way this can work is that for every $3 over a certain amount, the program benefit is reduced by $1. If this were applied to Mark Milota's case, then for being over the level by $21, his food stamps would be reduced by only $7.
We WANT to be encourage people to go find any work they can (even in this economy when it is so hard). But instead, the way these benefit programs are managed, it actually discourages people from doing things that take them above the levels of getting benefits.
I have no problem paying for my house and all other bills, making maybe 1000 dollars monthly after taxes. The average income where I live is probably at least 45,000. I do not use and have not applied for food stamps. Your zeal is overcooked, chief.
@Andrew Norton: I have friends in Georgia (Macon and Atlanta suburbs) and there's a stark difference in how far a dollar can go, I agree. I think in the case of the people in the article, they have overriding debt or there's just something that isn't in the article. We do know that he's three months behind on mortgage payments. But with them being in Marietta, it's possible they were living a little more lushly than others - I hesitate to jump to conclusions based on one small photo of their kitchen.
How much did your friends in Marietta make? I wouldn't consider Marietta rural by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't really think it would have a huge cost of living (not like NYC or Chicago).
Stopped paying his mortgage? $1500 isn't enough for that?
He's just trolling again. Just ignore it. Maybe he suffers from assburgers or some conservative touched his weewee when he was 6 and scarred him for life. Now, every single one of his posts references the great conservative boogieman.
@tmed:
(In theory) YOU are the government, so be mad at which ever side you voted for, call them right now and let them know.
NOOOO. You can't fight people like Trai with facts. It just bounces off of him like cheeseburgers off a brick wall. You should just mock him and watch him foam at the mouth for the lulz.
@billbobbins: Your profile says you've been here for a year, and you're actually surprised that bringing up someone's race as a way to blame them for their problems is a regularly-used stereotype on here?
Oh wait, you're the troll who made the shitty stereotyping comment that someone who is poor MUST play scratch-off tickets and smoke!
Who knows. It's hard not to be a little pissy about this. Hell, I get less than $500 a month living in metro NJ and he can't cover his bills with 3 times that in georgia.
@sir_pantsalot: Any type of government program that seeks to help the needy is automatically socialist. Gotcha.
@este: So, this attack on working families laid low is a bipartisan effort by Georgian lawmakers, or is this something that one side of the aisle? And if so, which?
Throwing ALL the bums out, when only some of them fit the description seems a recipe to ensure that bad government will triumph.
Not properly attaching blame in this makes as much sense as condemning both a bank robber and the police stopping him.
They should not have a hard cap, they should phase the food stamps out like my student loan tax deduction is phased out. If the person makes under the cap, he gets the entire $300 food stamps amount, if he makes less than $300 over the cap (in take home pay), then he will get the difference between the $300 and what he makes. This way he's essentially guaranteed $300 whether its all food stamps or part food stamps and part his own earnings.
OKay so (this'll be a long post).. i'm gunna try and play devils advocate here for a minute and show the results of frugal spending going on the data he gave and the data i've collected from government sites and the help of my dad who is a real estate guy (he does every aspect)
so from city-data i found the median price of homes .. i'm using Sumner georgia for all my tallies
Estimated median house or condo value in 2007: $87,559
we're going to assume he got his house in 2007 and use a 6% interest rate for figuring his mortgage $521.61
then we have howmeowners insurance the average for georgia found from Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner's office is $570 a year thats $47 a month
now we find property taxes, i called the georgia department of revenue and had teh nice lady do the figures for me at the above info using thde median value of $87,559 and without any homestead exclusions we get $1138 per year or $94 a month
so our current total is $662.61
now we add bills, electric, gas, water, and garbage
elec - from the georgia environmental facilities we get $92.79
gas from city data $50
water from oddly portland water bureau which had statistics from several places including georgia $40
bringing our new total to $845.40
now we have to factor the likelyhood that he has a car
from the georgia autmobile assoc we have $430 monthly payments
for insurance from the Dover Law firm we have $920 a year which is $76 a month
bringing our new total to $1351.40 a month in bills
we have $187 left for the month.. now we must manage gas, and groceries from that for the month..
so now.. with a COMPLETELY informed brain.. do you think 2 people could live on that for the month without any assistance?
Am I annoyed at the state or federal governement here?