Thread by @rebeccavallas

THREAD: As we mark the 50th anniversary of #SSI, it’s time to reckon with the fact that SSI’s woefully outdated eligibility rules—from a $2,000 asset limit to marriage penalties and more—have become a new form of large-scale institutionalization without walls. #SSIat50🧵

Oct. 30 marks 50 years since Supplemental Security Income, or #SSI was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972.

Congress’s intent in establishing the program was to ensure that disabled and older adults “would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty incomes.” 2/x

Today, SSI provides critical income support to nearly 8M people with disabilities and older adults, including 1M disabled children.

Modest as benefits are, I saw early on as a legal aid lawyer how transformative the monthly income support from SSI can be in a person’s life. 3/x

For example, SSI can be the difference between having enough to eat vs. skipping meals to be able to afford the rent.

It can be the difference between being able to afford co-pays on needed prescriptions vs. cutting pills in half. 4/x

And for families with a disabled child, SSI can be the difference between being able to care for and meet your child’s needs at home instead of in an isolating and dangerous institution. 5/x

But as we mark 50 years of this critical program, #SSIat50 is a bittersweet anniversary to celebrate because SSI has been left to wither on the vine for nearly as long as it's been around. 6/x

As a result, while #SSIat50 still provides vital income support for millions, key elements of the program’s eligibility criteria have become extraordinarily restrictive, punitive, counterproductive, and even outright inhumane. 7/x

For example, a $2,000 asset limit that hasn’t been updated even for inflation since 1984, the year I was born.

An $85 monthly income limit that's never been updated for inflation in 50 years.

And cruel marriage penalties that keep folks from marrying the person they love. 8/x

Among the most important evolutions in America’s treatment of disabled people over the past century is the movement towards deinstitutionalization—the freeing of hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities from oppressive, isolating, and dangerous institutions. 9/x

But as we celebrate #SSIat50 and all the good SSI has done in so many people’s lives—it’s also time for us to acknowledge that, in many ways, SSI has become a prison without walls for millions of disabled and older adults because of decades of federal neglect. 10/x

SSI's rigid and antiquated eligibility rules -- which beneficiaries must live inside in order to maintain survival income and health insurance -- have become a new kind of large-scale institutionalization . . . +
11/x

. . . that is invisibly keeping millions of people with disabilities & seniors not only from full participation in American society—but from living lives with full human dignity and access to the American Dream. #SSIat50 12/x

So, as we continue to live through a pandemic that is not over—I often have poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor’s words ringing in my ears:

13/x

Brutal and lethal as #COVID19 has been, the pandemic is an invitation for myriad paradigm shifts—should we accept the invitation not to “go back to a normal” that never was apart from the parade of social ills it normalized. #SSIat50 14/x

So as we continue to live through the largest mass disabling event in modern history, ask yourself:

What kind of system would you design to be there for yourself, your family members, and your loved ones to be there if you become disabled?
15/x

One that bars emergency savings, penalizes you for marrying the person you love, punishes you for getting help from loved ones, and doesn't even bring you all the way to the federal government’s similarly outdated poverty line? #SSIat50 16/x

I suspect that’s not what many (if any!) of us would design for ourselves or for people we care about. 17/x

Yet until Congress takes action to reckon with how punitive and restrictive #SSIat50’s antiquated eligibility rules have become—that's what we as a society are tacitly saying is just fine for 8 million of our disabled and older neighbors. 18/x

Marking bittersweet anniversaries like this one is tough. On the one hand, we need to celebrate. And SSI has done a great deal of good in its 50 years. 19/x

But it’s also time to reckon honestly with where #SSIat50 stands today.

And what must be done for #SSI to not only live up to its legislative purpose—but to treat the people it was put in place to help as fully human.

20/x

Updating SSI’s woefully outdated asset limits and indexing them to inflation -- as @SenSherrodBrown & @SenPortman’s bipartisan SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would do -- is the actual least Congress could do to start this reckoning.

https://twitter.com/rebeccavallas/status/1521235172783497220?s=20&t=0fEHaHrz1j_Q6HawKRh18g

21/x

21/x

@SenSherrodBrown @SenPortman But don't take my word for it -- read SSI beneficiaries sharing in their own words why the need to #UpdateSSI has become one of the least well-covered human rights issues of our time:
tcf.org/content/commen… #SSIat50

22/x

@SenSherrodBrown @SenPortman When a program as critical as SSI can be ignored by Congress and left to be destroyed by inflation for 40 years -- it should come as little surprise that just 3 in 10 disabled voters believe leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities: tcf.org/content/commen…

23/x

@SenSherrodBrown @SenPortman So, let's mark #SSIat50 by making 2022 the year Congress finally starts bringing SSI into the 21st century -- and let's all do our part by calling our members of Congress to say "don't let the 117th Congress end without action to #UpdateSSI's asset limits"

☎️ 202-224-3121

/end