Joseph Shapiro
speaker
255 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Jul
Joseph Shapiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 4.
Appearances
If you are on SSI and, let's say, a family member took you out to lunch or invited you over to Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, you were supposed to give Social Security the receipt for the cost of the meal, the cost of your turkey, the cost of how much ham you ate at Christmas. And Social Security was supposed to then deduct the cost of that meal from your benefit check.
So Social Security just ended that just this past September. And there was a wide consensus that this rule didn't make sense and that it should end.
Well, not the Social Security Administration. Commissioner O'Malley told us that he, too, thinks the asset limit is long out of date, that it needs to be increased. But that's up to Congress. And there has been legislation supported by Democrats and Republicans, but it hasn't gotten very far.
Right. Well, cost is a big hurdle. Social Security's actuaries estimate that raising the asset limit to $10,000 would add almost $10 billion to the program over 10 years. But policy experts like Kathleen Romig, who we just heard,
argue that that's a pretty modest cost because it would make the system work a lot better, fewer recipients would get kicked off, and Social Security staff would spend less time trying to figure out who qualifies and who doesn't. SSI is just a small program. It's tiny compared to what we think of when we hear Social Security, right? The much larger retirement program.
Of all the monthly checks the Social Security Administration sends to Americans, SSI accounts for just 4%. But to run SSI takes up 38% of the agency's entire administrative budget.
Ayesha, last year I went to a protest against what disabled people called SSI's marriage penalty.
This is Patrice Jetter.
Jetter is a disabled woman from New Jersey. She was wearing a multicolored dress and a rainbow wig, and she was leading a marriage commitment ceremony on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Only it wasn't to get people legally married, really. It was a protest to bring attention to SSI's marriage penalty.
Because SSI's asset limit makes it really hard to get married and still qualify for SSI. Remember, for one person, you're not eligible for SSI if you own more than $2,000 in assets. That's already low. But for a married couple, the asset limit is only $3,000.
Give it a whoop whoop. The U.S. Capitol was gleaming in the background over a stage with a large heart of red and pink flowers.
Well, I spoke to about three dozen people. One of the saddest things many people told me is that they make the painful decision to close themselves off from dating, from love, romance, altogether. because they can't afford to fall in love with someone and risk losing their SSI.
One woman told me she felt forced to divorce her husband in order to keep the health care that came with her SSI eligibility. They still live together without a marriage license, but even that could get them in trouble with Social Security. Social Security calls that holding out to live as if you're married, even though you're not legally married.
So even though they spend all their time together, they still need to rent separate apartments. And when a state caseworker visits, the woman told me she takes down all the photos around the house of her with her partner.
For sure. The people I talk to say that they're blocked from a right that's given to everyone else. And just to step back for a moment, there's been a revolution in the expectations for disabled people's lives since SSI was created in 1972. It wasn't until 1975, three years after SSI was created, that the first law passed to guarantee kids with disabilities could go to school.
And SSI was created almost 20 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act, which in 1990 banned discrimination against people with disabilities to make sure they could have the same ambitions as everyone else to be fully integrated into American life. And that includes, by the way, the right to find meaning in work.
Right. So to be clear, very few people on SSI are able to work. Less than 10% do work. And most of them are in low-paying part-time jobs. But some do work, and SSI has rules around work. And those are stuck in another era, too. So there's a limit on how much someone on SSI can earn in one month. It's just $65. More than $65 in a month? SSI reduces their benefit check.
It takes $1 for every $2 they earn. So, in effect, that's a tax of 50% on some of the poorest people in America.
Right. It's totally out of date. Ayesha, I want to tell you about someone else I met on SSI. Tabby Haley. She has spinal muscular atrophy, which weakens her muscles and her lungs.
She's 40. Medical breakthroughs, new medicines make a longer life possible.
Showing 221–240 of 255 · page 12 of 13
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