Welfare varies wildly by state. It sucks in all of them but the degree and nature of it's hostility and intentional humiliation is different in each state.
Food stamps are coupons you can use as money to purchase an extremely restricted selection of foods. Compliance is intentionally made difficult by restricting what brands can be purchased, meaning that often a food item you are allowed to purchase cannot be purchased because only the wrong brand is available. This is done intentionally to make the process humiliating, difficult, and degrading
I'm not sure what the income is as it varies wildly by state and by your circumstances - Single women with children get more, single men without children often get nothing, but it's all woefully inadequate to have any kind of dignified life, and often inadequate to pay for food, let alone any other needs. Many places have work requirements that are more or less onerous in order to prevent people from being able to keep their welfare
It used to be better. It began to be gutted under President Reagan in the 1980s and every subsequent administration has made it more bureaucratic, more humiliating, and more inadequate.
Healthcare depends on the state. A handful of states held by Democrats offer adequate heathcare for some people. Other states offer very limited healthcare to an extremely restrictive list of people. It may be so limited as to not count.
It depends. In most places welfare is deliberately made so bureaucratically onerous that homeless people are not practically able to maintain their welfare approval. Many homeless people, I think like 50%, have jobs with pay inadequate to pay for housing. Wait lists for government assisted housing stretch for years, more than a decade for single men. Homeless people mostly survive by help from family, various charities, scavenging from dumpsters, and whatever else they can scrape together. Many spend a great deal of time in caged in jails, having been arrested for petty offenses or no offense. It's common for them to be jailed for a petty offense, then jailed again for missing a court date they had no way of knowing about or reaching, with this continuing to escalate until they're given a serious prison sentence and made in to slaves of the state.
Many of them don't survive. I can't prove it but I strongly suspect the death rates for homeless people are far higher than officially reported and the coroners just list other causes of death on the death certificates to keep the numbers down.
About half of all homeless people in the United States have a serious mental health condition. There is no real treatment for mental health in the US outside of a handful of states that have decent healthcare for the poor, and even in those states the available mental healthcare is pathetic and inadequate for many people.
People don't literally starve here because churches and community groups provide food, some staples are relatively inexpensive, and because there is so much food waste here that you can usually find edible food in dumpsters if nothing else is available, but the toll of early death from untreated illnesses, alcohol and drug use, street violence, and despair is considerable.
Death rates for the homeless in the U.S. are wildly under-reported because many times they die in areas that are not checked or watched by the general public. Just this last week, another John Doe was found in a forest, and because the body was too degraded, it is unclear what he died of or who he was just yet, but I suspect it was exposure over the winter and then sitting out in the rain and sun over the last six months or so, which would make the total of dead homeless in our area 7 this year alone, which is about a 4% mortality rate for the homeless population in our area, if the numbers are right. I also suspect that there are more bodies out there as there are still some missing regulars that have supposedly moved on to greener pastures, but I have no way to get confirmation on that. Honestly, COVID did a huge number on the homeless population, we were seeing death rates at like 10% a year during peak COVID, but the general healthy population did a lot better, saw a lot of obvious improvement, because they were being housed by the city for that time period. The whole COVID thing is finally what convinced the city to build a huge communal bed facility, still not housing so that sucks, but at least there are now finally far more beds than people at least as long as the rate doesn't skyrocket here.
Welfare in this country is a joke. If you at least don't have relatives to stay with or get your mail, you are basically a non-person in this country, and god forbid you move more than once a year. Even guaranteed unemployment payments that your job requires you to get are an absolute hassle to receive. I am still fighting the state government over unemployment checks that I should have received 3 years ago because some dumbass at the capital was like 'well he doesn't work there now, so he never worked there" and 'I'm like, if it didn't take you morons a whole year to sort out my mandatory unemployment, I would still be at that job.' and now I am sitting through my second appeal, all for $270. I am very lucky to not actually need the money, but I am operating purely on sunk cost right now.
I have a severe mental health condition that leaves me unable to work. Currently my family supports me. One of the small number of bad options I have for long term income is applying for supplemental security insurance, SSI. If I were to receive the maximum pay out allowed by the law, which is unlikely because I am a single male, I would receive approximately 700$ a month. The modal rent in the US is 1702$/month. As a middle aged single male with no children I am at the absolutely lowest priority for government housing. If I applied now I might hear back about an opening in a little over a decade.
I have a severe mental health condition that leaves me unable to work.
what is it? I'm trying to apply for disability (in Canada) for Generalized Anxiety Disorder and depression, I dunno if it's gonna work but there ain't no fucking way I'm getting a shitty pointless McJob again. would rather be homeless.
Have you ever read Kafka's The Trial?
Welfare varies wildly by state. It sucks in all of them but the degree and nature of it's hostility and intentional humiliation is different in each state.
Food stamps are coupons you can use as money to purchase an extremely restricted selection of foods. Compliance is intentionally made difficult by restricting what brands can be purchased, meaning that often a food item you are allowed to purchase cannot be purchased because only the wrong brand is available. This is done intentionally to make the process humiliating, difficult, and degrading
I'm not sure what the income is as it varies wildly by state and by your circumstances - Single women with children get more, single men without children often get nothing, but it's all woefully inadequate to have any kind of dignified life, and often inadequate to pay for food, let alone any other needs. Many places have work requirements that are more or less onerous in order to prevent people from being able to keep their welfare
It used to be better. It began to be gutted under President Reagan in the 1980s and every subsequent administration has made it more bureaucratic, more humiliating, and more inadequate.
Healthcare depends on the state. A handful of states held by Democrats offer adequate heathcare for some people. Other states offer very limited healthcare to an extremely restrictive list of people. It may be so limited as to not count.
It depends. In most places welfare is deliberately made so bureaucratically onerous that homeless people are not practically able to maintain their welfare approval. Many homeless people, I think like 50%, have jobs with pay inadequate to pay for housing. Wait lists for government assisted housing stretch for years, more than a decade for single men. Homeless people mostly survive by help from family, various charities, scavenging from dumpsters, and whatever else they can scrape together. Many spend a great deal of time in caged in jails, having been arrested for petty offenses or no offense. It's common for them to be jailed for a petty offense, then jailed again for missing a court date they had no way of knowing about or reaching, with this continuing to escalate until they're given a serious prison sentence and made in to slaves of the state.
Many of them don't survive. I can't prove it but I strongly suspect the death rates for homeless people are far higher than officially reported and the coroners just list other causes of death on the death certificates to keep the numbers down.
About half of all homeless people in the United States have a serious mental health condition. There is no real treatment for mental health in the US outside of a handful of states that have decent healthcare for the poor, and even in those states the available mental healthcare is pathetic and inadequate for many people.
People don't literally starve here because churches and community groups provide food, some staples are relatively inexpensive, and because there is so much food waste here that you can usually find edible food in dumpsters if nothing else is available, but the toll of early death from untreated illnesses, alcohol and drug use, street violence, and despair is considerable.
Death rates for the homeless in the U.S. are wildly under-reported because many times they die in areas that are not checked or watched by the general public. Just this last week, another John Doe was found in a forest, and because the body was too degraded, it is unclear what he died of or who he was just yet, but I suspect it was exposure over the winter and then sitting out in the rain and sun over the last six months or so, which would make the total of dead homeless in our area 7 this year alone, which is about a 4% mortality rate for the homeless population in our area, if the numbers are right. I also suspect that there are more bodies out there as there are still some missing regulars that have supposedly moved on to greener pastures, but I have no way to get confirmation on that. Honestly, COVID did a huge number on the homeless population, we were seeing death rates at like 10% a year during peak COVID, but the general healthy population did a lot better, saw a lot of obvious improvement, because they were being housed by the city for that time period. The whole COVID thing is finally what convinced the city to build a huge communal bed facility, still not housing so that sucks, but at least there are now finally far more beds than people at least as long as the rate doesn't skyrocket here.
Welfare in this country is a joke. If you at least don't have relatives to stay with or get your mail, you are basically a non-person in this country, and god forbid you move more than once a year. Even guaranteed unemployment payments that your job requires you to get are an absolute hassle to receive. I am still fighting the state government over unemployment checks that I should have received 3 years ago because some dumbass at the capital was like 'well he doesn't work there now, so he never worked there" and 'I'm like, if it didn't take you morons a whole year to sort out my mandatory unemployment, I would still be at that job.' and now I am sitting through my second appeal, all for $270. I am very lucky to not actually need the money, but I am operating purely on sunk cost right now.
I have a severe mental health condition that leaves me unable to work. Currently my family supports me. One of the small number of bad options I have for long term income is applying for supplemental security insurance, SSI. If I were to receive the maximum pay out allowed by the law, which is unlikely because I am a single male, I would receive approximately 700$ a month. The modal rent in the US is 1702$/month. As a middle aged single male with no children I am at the absolutely lowest priority for government housing. If I applied now I might hear back about an opening in a little over a decade.
what is it? I'm trying to apply for disability (in Canada) for Generalized Anxiety Disorder and depression, I dunno if it's gonna work but there ain't no fucking way I'm getting a shitty pointless McJob again. would rather be homeless.
Beat me to it - The Trial was apparently used as a blueprint for US welfare.
oh and a lot of states were able to convert the welfare fund into a general slush fund to give to essentially whatever capitalists they feel like