I Don't Know What's Going On

     There have been a number of strange comments that one or more people have tried to post here. I haven't allowed them to post but, still, I think readers may find them of interest so I've posted them below. The ones below are just from today. I think you'll understand why I didn't allow them to post normally. Some of these could just be awkwardly phrased but others seem to be coming from one or more people who barely speak English. Many of these come in bursts of two or three comments at a time, some of them the identical comment sent in response to different posts that I had made.

• Unknown has left a new comment on your post "Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments Duri...": Send me the money inside the next spend car
• Unknown has left a new comment on your post "Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments Duri...": I need my money
• Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "DDS Hiring In Arkansas In Anticipation Of A Signif...": Looks like Otto Von Trump. If he wins his true colors will come out and full retirement age will increase to 70 to 75. Maybe Saul will leave and Sen Rick Santorum will become new COSS.
• Unknown has left a new comment on your post "Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments Duri...": If your not entitle to money you spent it .you should of call SS to ask not spent money. The stimulus check was given its call greed using pandemic as loop hole to get money
• Unknown has left a new comment on your post "Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments Duri...": To many people on SSI SSI were getting unemployment benefits to Pandemic was approving these people Now they want their money back Its governments fault for giving out thousands of dallars
• Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments Duri...": My roommate was over paid by 500 dollars. They took it all back out of her next SAI payment. This affects me to. I'm also her landlord.

What Can Be Done About SSI For Puerto Rico And Other Territories?

Puerto Rico's flag

     I had promised some ideas on what can be done about the possibility that the Supreme Court will find that it is unconstitutional to deny SSI benefits to U.S. citizens who are residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. If this happens, there's going to be an avalanche of claims. I suppose I haven't gotten around to writing about this before now because I doubt that much will be done.

     If Donald Trump is re-elected or if Republicans continue to control the Senate, I'm pretty sure nothing will happen in advance of a Supreme Court decision. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it will be difficult to mount an effective response even after a Supreme Court decision that SSI must be offered to residents in the U.S. territories if Republicans control the White House or the Senate. As a party, they are hostile to government benefit programs and to Hispanics and they're disinterested in government operations.

     If Democrats control the White House and the Senate, it may depend upon what Senate Democrats do about the filibuster. While most Senate Democrats favor doing something about the filibuster, Senators Manchin, Jones and Sinema, at the least, oppose this effort. Democrats will need more than a bare majority to nuke the filibuster.

     If Democrats do control the White House and the Senate and can get around the filibuster, they can give the Social Security Administration more money to implement SSI in the territories. The problem is that the agency needed additional appropriations a couple of years ago to start preparing for this. About all the agency can do now with more money is to throw a lot of overtime at it, not just in Puerto Rico and the other territories, but across the country. This is way too big a problem to be handled just in the territories.

     Another thing that Congress can do is what was done at the time SSI was first created in 1972 and came into effect in 1974. They can grandfather in recipients of Aid to the Aged, Blind and Disabled (AABD). You see, SSI wasn't the first needs based program of financial assistance to the aged, blind and disabled. AABD benefits go back to the 1935. It's Title XIV of the Social Security Act. Those benefits were administered by the states but mostly paid for with federal dollars. In order to reduce the challenges of initially implementing SSI, recipients of AABD were grandfathered onto SSI benefits. AABD went away once SSI was implemented, except in the U.S. territories where it persists to this day.

     The problem with grandfathering in AABD recipients, apart from Republican efforts to obstruct the effort, is that there aren't that many recipients of AABD. Puerto Rico is poor but it had only about 37,00 AABD recipients as of 2016, the most recent year for which I can find numbers, and almost half of those were aged recipients, the easiest category to put on SSI benefits. This contrasts with the estimated 700,000 Puerto Ricans which may qualify for SSI. Why so few AABD recipients in Puerto Rico? The average AABD benefit in Puerto Rico is only $77 a month and the income limit is only $65 a month. Grandfathering in AABD recipients is better than nothing but it doesn't get you very far.

     The only other thing I can come up with is that Congress could pass a bill giving SSI to the territories effective in 2023 before a Supreme Court decision. That would give time to prepare adequately. The plaintiffs from Puerto Rico and Guam with pending cases could be bought off. What would you do about others trying to get benefits before 2023? I guess you'd just try to stall them and hope there's not too many of them. Of course, to do this Congress would have to act before the Supreme Court gets around to the issue. I doubt that there is any way of delaying a Supreme Court decision past June 2021. Unfortunately, preemptively giving SSI to the territories would require that Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, be able to nuke the filibuster and focus on this issue almost immediately after inauguration day. I'd be very surprised if that all happens.

     Does anyone have any better ideas other than hoping the Supreme Court holds that denying SSI to U.S. citizens residing in U.S. territories is constitutional? The Supreme Court could rule that way but as I mentioned in an earlier post, five federal judges have issued rulings on the issue so far and all five have found it unconstitutional even though four of the five were nominated by Republican Presidents.

     By the way, even if the Supreme Court rules that it's constitutional to deny SSI benefits to U.S. citizens who reside in the territories, we're not out of the woods. There is an effort to give statehood to D.C and Puerto Rico. There's a decent chance of that happening, depending upon the election result.

    

Legislation Introduced To Address Ovepayments During Pandemic

     From a press release:

Today, Ways and Means Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny K. Davis (D-IL) and Social Security Subcommittee Chairman John B. Larson (D-CT) introduced the Fairness for Seniors and People with Disabilities During COVID-19 Act, legislation to protect seniors, surviving spouses, children, and people with severe disabilities from being forced to repay extra Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits they may have received in error because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legislation comes at a critical moment, as reports indicate the Social Security Administration (SSA) may soon begin issuing letters demanding beneficiaries repay hundreds or even thousands of dollars they no longer have, in the middle of a pandemic. These beneficiaries did not know they were being overpaid, could do nothing to prevent these extra payments, and may have little ability to pay them back. ...

“Low income, disabled and seniors, many of whom are always at the precipice of falling into immediate life crisis, now face a new potentially disruptive conflict in their lives,” said Chairman Davis. “Some of these individuals, through no fault of their own, received automatic COVID-19 benefits in excess, in retrospect, of what the regulations prescribe. Attempting to ‘claw back’ some of these payments is not only impractical as the recipients are extremely unlikely to have the resources to return the payments, but it is also cruel and potentially dangerous as they could be forced into making impossible choices as to what to give up in their meager resources in an attempt to respond to any such demand. I believe the only just and humane approach to this confusion is a ‘no-fault’ stance to this looming threat; that is, hold these recipients harmless against any errors on the part of the government. No one in government ever intended that the COVID-19 benefits should cause any harm or injustice to the recipients.”  ...

Get Over It, GOP!

     From Michael Hiltzik writing for the Los Angeles Times:

Social Security advocates who breathed a sigh of relief when Senate Republicans rejected President Trump’s demand to place a payroll cut in the latest coronavirus relief bill exhaled too soon.

The version unveiled Monday by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) incorporates a provision even more menacing for Social Security (and Medicare too).

This is the so-called TRUST Act, which was crafted by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and has been bubbling along in Capitol Hill corridors since last year. ...

The TRUST Act — the acronym stands portentously for “Time to Rescue United States’ Trusts” — would work by ginning up a sense of near-term emergency about the finances of Social Security, Medicare and the federal highway trust fund. ...

Congress would then appoint bipartisan committees mandated to “draft legislation that restores solvency and otherwise improves each trust fund program,” as Romney has described the process. Whatever proposals these panels produced would be fast-tracked in Congress and not subject to amendment. (The bills would need 60 votes in the Senate.)

On the surface, this seems almost innocuous — so much so that the act has attracted co-sponsorships from a handful of inattentive and somewhat conservative Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They should pay better attention. ...

Since the TRUST panels’ deliberations will be offered to Congress on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, the process rather serves what the GOP refers to as the need to gut Social Security “behind closed doors,” to quote an unwittingly revealing line uttered last year by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). ...

     I'm confident this isn't happening in this stimulus bill but it shows the implacable hostility that Congressional Republicans have for Social Security. This won't happen because mainstream Congressional Democrats are even more devoted to maintaining Social Security. I understand that Manchin is in a red state and Sinema is in a purple state but that doesn't explain why they would support this. They're certainly isolated within their party. Even if you could force a vote on a bill to cut Social Security in any significant way, it wouldn't get a majority vote even from Republicans. It's hopeless. Americans love Social Security. Get over it, GOP!

SSDI Recipients Eligible For PUA

     Under the laws of the state of Wisconsin, North Carolina and possibly other states, individuals who receive Disability Insurance Benefits (DIB) from the Social Security Administration are ineligible for standard unemployment compensation. The CARES Act adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic created a new type of federally funded unemployment compensation, Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUA), for those not eligible for regular unemployment compensation. The state of Wisconsin asked the U.S. Department of Labor whether individuals receiving DIB would be eligible for PUA since they are barred from receiving regular unemployment compensation. The answer came down yesterday. They are eligible.

DDS Hiring In Arkansas In Anticipation Of A Significant Increase In Disability Claims

     From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

The Legislative Council on Friday approved Arkansas Disability Determination for Social Security Administration's request to create 92 new positions. ...

"Due to the current situation in our country, Social Security Administration ... anticipates a significant national increase of federal Social Security disability cases in many states, as well as Arkansas," state Personnel Director Kay Barnhill wrote in a memo to the Legislative Council's personnel subcommittee chairmen, Rep. Jim Wooten, R-Beebe, and Sen. David Wallace, R-Leachville. ...

     I haven't seen a surge in disability claims due to Covid-19. I'm expecting some claims as a result of long term health problems related to Covid-19 but I haven't seen a single case yet.

An Ordeal For SSI Recipients

     From Ari Ne’eman writing for the New York Times:

... Looking at the mess facing S.S.I. recipients who try to work, one feels that a terrible mistake has been made. But history tells a different story: this Kafkaesque nightmare was a deliberate choice. ...   

In the [Social Security Act’s] early years, federal officials, including the Social Security Board’s chairman Arthur Altmeyer, feared that generous state public assistance programs would build momentum for replacing Old Age Insurance with a more progressive alternative. ... Critics wanted equal benefits for all, financed by a redistributive payroll tax. ...   

To protect against this possibility, Altmeyer made getting public assistance as unpleasant as he possibly could. States were told that they could not receive federal money unless they conducted intrusive investigations of every applicant, reducing benefits to those who received food or shelter from family or friends. Programs that permitted beneficiaries to work and save were told to adopt more restrictive eligibility standards or be denied funding. ...   

[Despite criticism] Altmeyer’s vision remained largely intact. Public assistance maintained an aggressive means test. When disability and aging programs were federalized into the Supplemental Security Income program in 1971, these restrictions came with them. 

Today, economists refer to Altmeyer’s strategy as an “ordeal” — a burden imposed on those receiving benefits that yields no benefit to others. The purpose of an ordeal is not to help the beneficiary or others in society. Instead, ordeals deliberately make a program or service worse in order to discourage people from using it.