Only the Means Test Survives
I don’t remember when this seizure began. When I came to, my brother was scooping me up off the bathroom floor & carrying me to the back of my parents’ car. It was 2:30am, sometime in 2011. Or 2012. It wasn’t the first or last time I’d be rushed to the hospital.
American public policy is a swarm of erroneous assumptions, manufactured myths & retroactive origin stories. When it comes to welfare, the faulty assumption is these programs serve the people who need them.
Welfare is accessible only after navigating a labyrinth of means tests fraught with arbitrary, sadistic rationalizations. Approval is contingent on if your predicament corresponds to welfare’s frequently insurmountable preconditions. If you don’t tick every box, you’re disqualified.
Very serious politicians debated with their very serious faces this past week that means tests on Covid relief is imperative to exclude those in the undeserving category. The means test for one-time checks is predicated on obsolete 2019 income data. Requiring additional hurdles ignores the decades of means testing already intertwined into welfare programs.
Despite these politicians’ performative concern-trolling about merit, the American plutocracy — including most Democratic politicians in Congress — remains the most prolific & consistent recipient of welfare, bar none. People who desperately required aid were denied financial reprieve in 2020 — more will be tormented by these diabolical restrictions for years to come.
Means tests stem from duplicitous economic myths, most notably the classification of people as “deserving” & “undeserving” (read: white supremacy & patriarchy.) Yet means tests are nevertheless portrayed as a necessary mechanism to prohibit the economically stable from being welfare beneficiaries.
Means tests are not some innocuous, theoretical device — they are an economic weapon designed to oppress. Means tests traumatize. Means tests scar. Means tests kill. I know — I bear the lacerations of means tests on my body. Means tests nearly cost me my life.
The nurse can’t get a line in me. The emergency room lights are fluorescent flickering nerves. I’m distracted with convulsions, with filling vomit bag after vomit bag that my brother is graciously fetching for me. The nurse is waiting for shift change. She’s given up. I don’t really blame her. The goose-flesh room temperature, the thin hospital gown & my body’s dehydration make finding a vein impossible.
My family did everything “right” — private liberal arts & sciences K-12 education, extracurriculars, community service, college. None of it mattered when my health collapsed.
In May 2007, 2 years after completing my B.A. in Communications / Journalism at California State University Hayward (now East Bay), I had my initial health aberration. Over the ensuing 3 years, I experienced fluctuations of baffling symptoms with no discernible cause.
In 2009 I became infected with MRSA, the antibiotic resistant form of staphylococcus aureus. My physician couldn’t ascertain how I’d been exposed. In April 2010, I was ushered to the emergency room with an acute MRSA infection in both arms.
In November 2010, I nearly lost my right arm. Still, no doctor could diagnose me. Specialists would come gawk at me, speculate & whisper reverently about me, the medical anomaly.
Critical symptom onset, protracted periods of recovery & perplexity at my condition became recurring themes. The other common occurrences? Exclusionary means tests & death. In early 2011, I nearly died.
That was the second time I came close to dying. There would be another 4 near-death experiences before my dire symptoms abated years later.
I pierce my current infected abscess with a single-use only scalpel. I’m eerily accustomed to operating on myself at home. It saves my family money. I have finally been approved for “health insurance,” but that has only brought a new nightmare of costs. As I cut a hole in myself large enough to expel the blood & dead white blood cells, I heave a sigh of relief.
My health issues manifested pre-ACA, back when illness was considered a preexisting condition to the health-insurance industry. My family eventually had to reclaim me as a dependent to offset my medical debt.
I was in my early 30s — means testing rendered me ineligible for Medicare, Medicaid & disability. When I reached the age of 35, means testing calculated again. The result of that equation? I was disqualified because my family possessed “sufficient resources.” Translation: their annual earnings were just a notch above the income stipulations for welfare recipients.
MRSA, depression, anxiety & chronic pain weren’t considered disabling under means test parameters. No job meant no taxable income. With no W4 paper trail to evaluate whether I was merited help, I existed in a dual medical & means-tested no-mans-land for over a decade.
To be counted as “long-term unemployed” by the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, you must be (1) unemployed for 6.5 months or longer & (2) you must be actively seeking employment for the previous month.
How can you seek employment, let alone work, when you’re unable to? How can you care for yourself when you can’t work? How do you survive economically when you’re means-tested out of welfare & health services are for who can afford them?
These aren’t trick questions. You can’t. You & your family are left to fend for yourselves. If you can.
……the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time & who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail 16 April, 1963
Despite the irrefutable desperation & gravity of this moment, Democratic politicians are defaulting to incrementalism, cautioning us “to wait for a more convenient season.” Biden acquiesced this week to further means testing for the one-time $2k-now-$1400 survival check & reducing unemployment benefits from $400 to $300.
Democratic Senators are actively thwarting Bernie Sanders’ effort to pass the gradual federal minimum wage raise of $15 through budget reconciliation. Vice President Kamala Harris — who can override the non-binding, advisory opinion of the Senate Parliamentarian — deferred to “respecting the rules” of Congressional procedure.
Democrats are the party of moderates who fetishize gradualism, preemptively compromising with themselves (AND neofascist Republicans.) It’s the same mealy-mouthed “(we) agree with you in the goal you seek, but cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”
How many Covid long haulers won’t qualify for welfare under our current system? How many people who lost their jobs in 2020 won’t satisfy one-time check & unemployment requirements? How many even earned enough to survive on unemployment?
One-time checks get spent. Unemployment runs out. Covid is one in a long list of conditions that don’t qualify for disability. We haven’t yet witnessed the full extent of Covid’s damage. But some Democratic politicians still insist on preempting economic recovery with more means tests, hellbent on repeating the failed austerity politics that cost them electorally in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2014 & 2016. Sure, let’s preemptively add 2022 & 2024 to that list.
Imagine the blue-wave campaign sign: “Democrats play by the rules!”
Republican counter sign: “Democrats gave you LESS money than Trump did.”
- Wait, wasn’t the one-time check was originally $2k?
- No, you uninformed pleb — we the Democratic Party luminaries meant $600 + $1400.
- What about the $15 minimum wage?
- We pinky-swearsies we’ll get to it in the future. The Senate Parliamentarian said wages don’t impact the budget.
- HUH???!! Raising wages doesn’t impact the budget, WTAF?!
- Don’t worry, we’ll do it. We’ll get Republicans to vote with us. Their fever will totally break! That’s why we won’t get rid of the filibuster either.
- Psst — you won’t receive the full $15 until 2024. It depends on where your state’s minimum wage is. It may not impact your state until 2024. States like Arizona. But don’t ask Kyrsten Sinema about her lies — it’s impolite.
My health plot twists subsided in 2019. I emerged in 2020 to the Covid-19 pandemic, a shattered economy & a 13 year gap in my résumé. For now, I’m locked in an unemployed, post-undergrad stasis. And yet I still happen to be a fortunate case in a nation that capitalizes on economic brutality.
My family survived despite of my health upheaval sandwiched between 2 global crises. For a time, I thought I would die. But I didn’t. I am housed, clothed, fed & the bills are paid. Job searches with a decade-plus gap in work history sucks, but not as much as being shoved into poverty on purpose via extraneous means tests by multi-millionaire politicians.
Tens of millions of my fellow citizens are job, house &/or food insecure. They’re condemned to means tests for one-time checks distributed twice in one year & unreliable unemployment benefits. They’re compelled to work for the enslavement wage of $7.25 ($2.13 for tipped wage workers.) Their hazard pay & benefits were cut long ago.
Democratic politicians negotiating these means tests act as if they are indispensable tools to stave off welfare manipulation. They aren’t. They are the very devices enabling economic exploitation, especially when those who devour the majority of our tax revenue are the 0.1%.
“Give Biden a chance!”
“At least he‘s not Trump.”
— Neoliberal Twitter
George W. Bush was elected (at least in 2004) after Bill Clinton. Donald Trump won after Barack Obama. I was unemployed for Obama & Trump’s terms — I’m still unemployed under Joe Biden. I was means-tested out of social welfare under Obama & Trump. I’m still excluded under Biden.
Nothing has fundamentally changed.
Means tests are NEVER applied when our government dispenses welfare for the rich & corporations. Policies that enrich plutocrats are executed with ruthless expediency by both parties. Trump’s America was a debacle for everyone but the wealthy, but Pre-Trump America was also an unjust abomination.
Supplemental means testing is a systemic “fuck-off & die,” an irrefutable atrocity against the people most harmed during crisis & calm alike. Absolving Biden’s mediocre policies & needless capitulations with the reductive gauge of “not Trump” is offensive to the 100s of thousands of people who elected him to survive.
Democrats have no excuse for sabotaging their power, except the ones they’re manufacturing to exonerate their corruption & negligence. If Democrats compromise with themselves for more stringent means tests (they will); if Democrats pearl-clutch about procedural etiquette as their rationale to abort raising the enslavement wage (they will); if Democrats’ solution for 2-4 years is resuming the utterly sociopathic, inexcusable Pre-Trump “normal,” well, they’re pounding nails into their own electoral coffins.
And until those elections come around, a convoluted web of means tests await to weigh whether our souls deserve a single check. Some of us will not qualify. Some of us will not survive.
Some covid long haulers won’t. Some workers won’t.
500,000 Americans (& counting) didn’t.
