The Cruelest Marriage Penalty
How SSI asset limits require pledging "for poorer and poorer"
I’m in Minneapolis to speak tomorrow, and then I’m back(?!) there two weeks later. And I’ve done a video with Edify on what kinds of deaths gun control can and can’t prevent.
There’s a lot of talk about different kinds of marriage penalties in the tax code (when being legally married puts you at a disadvantage relative to cohabiting and filing separately). They’re well worth addressing, but for the most part, they’re a matter of putting pressure on couples at the margin—marriage means forfeiting a few thousand dollars you may not be able to afford to lose. And we don’t mean to add a luxury tax to marriage!
But, at First Things, I’m writing about the most insidious marriage penalty in our tax-and-benefits regime. For disabled recipients of SSI, marriage doesn’t mean paying more in taxes; it means risking their life by forfeiting skilled nursing help. It means someone who would otherwise be pledging “for richer, for poorer” is instead held to a promise of immiseration.
SSI holds recipients to tight asset limits—$2k for singles, $3k for married couples. It’s obviously cruel and punitive for both single and married recipients. But it represents a much higher barrier to marriage than most “marriage penalties” and strikes at the promise of mutual aid people long to give each other when they wed.
If a husband and wife were trying to be prudent and hoped to build a stable life without the safety net of SSI, they’d be cut off from support well before they could build a reasonable emergency fund.
That means planning for a wedding when one or both of the couple is disabled and receiving SSI involves some extra steps beyond talking to the priest or picking out a dress. The non-disabled spouse might be in a hurry to trade her car before the wedding for the cheapest beater car available. A couple can only have one car exempted from the asset limit, even if both can and need to drive. The “extra” car counts against the amount of pooled savings the couple is allowed to have. It’s also a good time for the fiancé to stop paying premiums on the life insurance he hoped might ease the burden on his soon-to-be wife and potential children—SSI recipients are only allowed to have life insurance with a combined cash value of $1500 or less.
In the piece, I draw on excellent reporting from Sara Luterman of The 19th, who profiles Amber Wise, a woman who married and lost her eligibility for Medicaid-sponsored in-home aid. Because Amber couldn’t use the bathroom without assistance, she fasted from water all day when her husband was at work. To both their sorrow, their marriage imperiled her life.
My colleagues at my new job are pushing for the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which is under consideration in Congress, and would raise asset limits for both single and married couples. Will Raderman has done some excellent writing on how the SSI limits function as a poverty trap, tying additional burdens on those who can least bear them. It’s well worth a call to your Congressional Representatives.
The other cruelty that stands out in the structure of SSI is the way it penalizes “in-kind” support from friends and family. As I write at First Things,
The SSI’s scoring system for “in kind” aid (non-cash contributions of goods or services) strikes at familial love and friendships, just as the asset and income limits punish marriage. When the mother of an SSI recipient allows her son to live with her rent-free, his benefits are reduced by up to a third to compensate for the “asset” of his mother’s love and home. If a friend picks up groceries and grills for his housebound college buddy, the cost of those groceries is “income,” which is offset by a reduction in benefits. At every turn, SSI penalizes people for being part of a community of care.
This is one of the most egregious examples I’m aware of, but I’m interested in taking a more systemic look at this kind of policy (which I’m calling in my notes app “Illegal to Care”).
There are a lot of ways we obstruct natural relationships of care and dependence, sometimes as deliberate subversion, sometimes as collateral damage in pursuit of a different good. Some examples that come to mind for me:
limiting ADUs/ways to care safely for aging parents/disabled kids with a measure of independence
offering tax subsidies for center-based childcare but not family or informal care
a wide range of “Time Tax” policies that outsource the administration/paperwork burden of a program intended to help the vulnerable to uncompensated caregivers
Thank you for writing about this. I have a friend on SSI who can't work outside the home but is probably the hardest worker I know. Once when she was at risk of going over the asset limit, she was told to spend money on going out to eat or to the movies - nothing keepable that would count as an asset - in order to keep the health insurance that she relies on. And of course, with the chronic health condition that she needs SSI for, there's no way that $2,000 and change would cover her health care needs without insurance. It absolutely is a poverty trap.
Eliminating the savings penalty seems like such an obvious and long-overdue solution; not that it's all that's needed, but it would be a huge step in the right direction: allowing a pathway out of poverty though savings, reducing reliance on public benefits, and as you point out here, making some badly-needed room for communities of care.
It's long past time to stop punishing people both for the individual hard work that our culture claims to value so much, and for the unavoidable and socially enriching interdependence that our culture too often undervalues.
I really appreciate this article. I'm on SSI and you do feel like you have to take a vow of extreme poverty in exchange for meager, but needed, benefits. The resource limits really do need to be increased and it would be a major win for the quality of life for disabled people. Currently there are a variety of convoluted ways to avoid this trap which just add an unnecessary layer of complexity. Or you may not qualify due to the particulars of your disability and/or SSA for a particular type of account. Often times it's just easier to eschew these schemes altogether for the simplicity of mandatory income reporting.
It's sad that I watched a documentary about SSI and disability in marriage not too long ago that was made in the 1990s. Nothing has changed since then. It really does need to change.