There is a rule in this country that says if you have more than two thousand dollars in the bank, you can lose your income.
Not two thousand a month. Two thousand total. Everything you have.
That number was set in 1989. It has never been raised. Not once in thirty-seven years.
Let me tell you who it applies to.
Supplemental Security Income goes to people who are 65 or older, or blind, or living with a disability, and who have almost nothing. About 7.3 million Americans get it. Two and a half million of them are over 65.
The most anyone can receive is $994 a month. The average check in June was $738. For people over 65 it was $611.
Try that for a minute. Six hundred and eleven dollars a month, and if your savings account ever crosses two thousand, you can lose it.
Here is what that does to a person’s life.
There is a woman in Ohio who set up her bank to text her the balance every single day. Not weekly. Daily. Because if it drifts too high she has to go spend money she does not need to spend, on nothing in particular, just to get back under the line.
Think about what we are asking her to do. We tell people all their lives to save. Put something aside. Be responsible. And then we build a program that takes the check away when she does it.
She is not gaming anything. She is watching a number every morning so she does not get thrown off a lifeline.
It gets worse if you get married.
You would think two people would get double the limit. Two thousand each, four thousand together. That is not how it works. A married couple gets three thousand. Fifty percent more, not double.
So getting married costs you a thousand dollars of headroom. There is a young woman in Michigan who got married anyway and said the rules amount to enforced poverty. She is right, and she knew what it would cost her.
Now here is the part I actually want to talk about.
There is a bill to fix this.
It would raise the limit to ten thousand for a person and twenty thousand for a couple, and then index it so this never happens again. It is called the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act.
Look at who is behind it.
A Republican from Pennsylvania and a Democrat from Illinois introduced it in the House. In the Senate it is a Democrat from Nevada, a Republican from Louisiana, and a Democrat from Oregon. A Republican from Ohio signed on last month.
More than two hundred organizations back it. AARP. The Paralyzed Veterans of America. And the United States Chamber of Commerce — the business lobby — on the same bill as the disability advocates.
You could not build a broader coalition if you tried. There is no organized opposition. Nobody is out there arguing that seniors should be held to two thousand dollars.
That bill was introduced in April of 2025.
It has been sitting in committee for seventeen months. No markup. No committee vote. No floor vote. Nothing.
Not blocked. Not defeated. Not amended. Just never scheduled.
And when a reporter asked one of the Republican sponsors about it recently, he said it should be part of a larger package that also deals with Social Security’s long-term solvency.
Read that again. The man whose name makes the bill bipartisan says his own bill should ride along with the hardest problem in American politics.
That is not a sponsor pushing. That is a sponsor explaining why nothing is going to happen.
[MICHAEL — your paragraph here. Something from your own working life where everybody in the room agreed on the fix and it still never got done. The kind of thing that sat on a list for years.]
So what is the lesson.
We are taught that the way things change is you build support. Get the facts right. Get both parties. Get the groups behind you. Make the case so clean that nobody can argue with it.
They did all of that. Every bit of it.
And it turns out none of it matters if nobody with the authority to schedule a vote decides to schedule one.
Agreement is not the scarce thing. Agreement is sitting right there, two hundred organizations deep, with a Republican and a Democrat on the same line.
What is scarce is somebody willing to spend an afternoon of floor time on people who do not fund campaigns.
There are about nine weeks until the election. September belongs to keeping the government open. October, they all go home to campaign.
That bill is not moving. Not this year.
And on the first of January, the limit will still be two thousand dollars, same as it was when the Berlin Wall was standing.
The woman in Ohio will check her balance again in the morning.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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