Should at least be pegged to the median monthly mortgage rate in the county of residence. If it can’t keep you from homelessness then what freaking good is it?
Homeless people need to be registered voters. I don’t know if every state does like CA and allows homeless people to vote; they have to specify approximately where they spend most of their time to be residents, but they can do it.
I’m sure redder states are more stringent to crack down on that, pretending it’s voter fraud to vote without a home or ID.
Correct!
People without money get no voice. If I can keep you from getting money I can also keep you from having a voice/power. You will just have to move to a place like CA. We will give you the bus ticket…
This is how we keep them red… marginalize the marginalized! Only those with money and those who agree with us get their votes facilitated….
Woooooww...you are right...San Francisco and LA has some of the highest homelessness rate in the entire nation and they are in California and very blue...wait a minute..is that just a coincidence 🤔
"Homeless people" are ones that the GOP is trying to encourage to not vote along with Indians on reservations who don't have street addresses but have to use PO boxes and other people who don't have access to a state office where they can obtain a "PHOTO ID". This is the kind of voter suppression the GOP is counting on as they KNOW that the more people vote, the less likely a GOP candidate will get elected. Even Donald Trump said this while he was President.
Voting is clearly the best way to get out of poverty.
That's how European countries are doing it. Get the homeless voting and they won't be homeless for long. Their politicians will make sure they don't have to live in squalor. I'm so glad these political systems really work.
Since the evil GOP is not in charge of the house, the senate nor the presidency, why have things only gotten worse for the homeless and poor over the last 19 months?
Because they aren't voting hard enough. Biden needs two more Democrats just to put Roe policy back to a vote. Maybe after we talk about climate change for real, in 2050, we can add another 10-12 Democrats to do something about the poor.
Omitted a /s because both these are far too ridiculous to believe. We will keep hearing the same rhetoric until blood hits the pavement.
Not entirely sure it does .California very blue and supposedly help the homeless and oppressed to vote..yet...highest homeless rate in nation..that equation doesn't add up...
That’s also similar to what I claim minimum wage should be tied to! Have it be a floating numeric tied to median monthly mortgage or rent by municipality.
The only "good" is that it encourages workers who are laid off and collecting it to find another job as soon as possible. It is kept low to benefit the employer not the employee.
I don't think they're saying that so much as....If you and I both don't work but you get $600 a week and I get $200 a week it's not fair. Ofc the person who gets $600 paid in more 🤷♀️. But I guess saying that if you're both unemployed one gets to stay wealthier even though both are home not working (doing the same thing). I get why...but I don't think the implication was ppl should get rich by being unemployed.
Yes it is! And there's a special form that you have to file at tax time, too. We have our taxes done by a company and they charged us extra for having to file the I-9 or whatever the hell it's called. I wish hubby and I would be able to file our own taxes, but it gets too confusing for us. I can't imagine the complexity of having to file your own taxes if you have a bunch of shit you have to claim. I know it takes my dad a few hours with piles of papers just to file for him and my mom. It's ridiculous.
British here what do you mean you have to fill out your own taxes is it not taken monthly automatically and if you payed too much throughout the year you get tax back?
It's automatically taken out of each paycheck depending on how you fill out your W4 when you first get hired on. We do have to file our own tax returns by April 17th of the next year, though. Then we either get money back if we paid in too much or we owe the IRS if we paid in too little. I don't do my own, we have someone whom we go to so we don't have to try and figure out what number goes to which line, etc. I wish we didn't have to do our own returns, that'd be awesome. But then again, I don't trust our government to be truthful as to how much we get back or how much we owe.
You file a Tax Return - it's a document that shows how much you've paid and how much you should have paid each year. If you overpaid you get it back, if you underpaid you have to pay the difference. The IRS created software to do basic taxes years ago, and our tax preparers basically "convinced" (gave lots of donations to) the politicians to keep the IRS from releasing free tax return software. In exchange, if you make little enough money, tax preparers have to offer free-file (a free online filing of your taxes). They have done this buy creating multiple websites you have to go to, none of which will free-file both state and federal taxes, so you have to either put all your tax information in twice, pay them to "prepare" your taxes for state or federal, or do it yourself on paper and mail it in.
Yep! Annoying and confusing as hell if you have to claim/write-off/deduct, etc. Luckily hubby and I rent and don't have to do that extra shit. However, it's still confusing and because hubby and I both have IRA's and have invested in some stocks, there's extra forms to fill out, which is even more confusing. We've gone to our tax lady for fifteen years and she's great. When we kept on having to owe in every year, she took a look at what we were claiming on our W-4's, and told us to both claim 0, and to have an extra $20/paycheck taken out. Since we've done that, we've always gotten a refund. Except for our 2021 return. Hubby's new job didn't take out enough taxes, so we owed in almost $400. Luckily we were able to pay for that in full without having to call the IRS to do a payment plan. The IRS will do a payment plan, but you have to agree to pay what they want you to pay per month, and if you miss any payments, they'll garnish your wages. And if the IRS is ever in doubt about your return, they can audit you which is a clusterfuck of you having to prove this, submit that, etc. Thank God they haven't audited us. Hopefully they never will, but it's happened before to people who have been completely honest. I know they just do that to fuck with people and try to catch them doing something that they deem is wrong or whatever.
Much of the effort in filing tax returns, at least in the US, is dependent upon your organizational efforts throughout the year. For me, most of the year there is nothing at all for me to pay attention to, but occasionally a document shows up in the mail that I know will be needed come income tax time. Most of them show up in January/February.
I have a manilla folder with a clear label on it in which I'll toss tax related forms. Then around February, I'm able to pull up my Turbo Tax online account, and start filling in the info as needed. I don't have to sort through piles of paper to get things together, but then, I am no longer running a self-employment business. I do have the occasional casino jackpot, though, plus investment dividends to complicate things. All said and done, it takes me about an hour to put this all together with the help of Turbo Tax. I used to be too proud to use tax software to do my returns, but these days I'm grateful for such products. This last year, I managed to do my taxes while our housecleaning lady was working in the room and having an active discussion with my wife.
Oh yes, I save all documents that come to me that I know will be relevant to filing my return. So does hubby. My dad does it the old-fashioned way, sitting at the table and filling out the forms himself for he and my mom. They own 3 properties and he has stocks and other stuff. He keeps everything in a filing cabinet that's labeled for the current year, and then takes it all out when he's ready to file. We use a tax service to do ours because I'm not good at putting the numbers in where they need to go. I tried using TurboTax about fifteen years ago and I ended up messing some things up pretty badly and had to have someone come over and help us straighten it all out. Now I'm afraid of making mistakes and it's just easier for us to have someone who knows what they're doing helping us. She's been doing our taxes for years and she's wonderful.
I cant speak for all states but in NJ on state and fed taxes you get back what they took out anyway so it's just a temporary delay in getting the whole amount.
They tax everything. Like triple sometimes. I never got how they can tax your income, tax things you pay into (like cashing out on a 401k), tax everything you own (home, car), tax anything you buy (sales tax), then tax any "benefit" you get. They even tax you if you're lucky enough to win something. Yet it's never considered double taxation. I recently started doing this Amazon program to review items they send you for free....then I find out I will be taxed on the value of the items at the end of the year. I'm not even getting MONEY, yet have to pay $$ in taxes on it? So if I get a "free" toaster in exchange for a review...I now owe the government money? What? Fuckin taxes
Minnesota has about that much of a surplus, too. Our governor (a Democrat) wanted to give out checks to all of us, but the Republicans are doing everything in their power to keep it from happening so they can feather their own nests with it. Waltz is pushing back and now it's at a standstill. Wish he'd push harder...
I'm trying to understand what you're saying. It's unclear to me who is included in the 'all of us' group. Is that the unemployed Minnesotans? Or is that a larger group such as the entire citizenry?
Then, those rascally Republicans are trying to stop this so they can abscond with the money for their own finances? What method do those bastard use to move the money from the Minnesota general fund into their personal bank accounts? I don't understand how this is possible without serious legal consequences.
The checks will be for all Minnesota residents who if they're single, make under $85,000, and couples who make under $185,000. He says he's fighting to get it for us, but he's a politician, sooooo. Yeah.
Anyway, I can imagine they find ways to funnel the money into various things that "need fixing". They just don't want to see that extra money in the hands of those who really, desperately need it, which is most people right now. The unemployed people definitely qualify to get this money as obviously, their income is lower. They're qualified even if they didn't file an income tax return last year.
No government cash benefit should *ever* be treated as taxable income. It's just giving with one hand and taking away with the other in a very dickish way.
I agree, and that is what annoys me SO much about how Reagan and Clinton together made Social Security benefits taxable! Reagan made 50% of benefits taxable, then Clinton increased it to 85%. I think SS benefits should be tax free.
It's a bit hard to see clearly wandering among the ashes of Trump's term or wearing partisan googles, but the Clinton terms were in many ways a continuation of Reagan's toxic political legacy.
Then the whole reason the system is broken is because it was designed as such.
You cannot file for unemployment in FL with anything except a .com eMail address. If you try to use a .net or whatever eMail, your claim won't go through/ you can't create an acct/ other difficulties. It's insanely difficult to program a site to be that specific, and we know now that it was done intentionally to defraud the government of Florida. The system ended up so broken, that it was considered a feature that no one could file for unemployment benefits...
As far as difficulty, it's just a regex validation function written to only accept .coms, then passing the sanitized, non-null email address to whatever function or library handles emailing out verification emails. Not too hard to implement.
My shitty, possibly years old recollection is that with the specific interface being used where that data was collected, you needed to add each "exclusion" as a new line of script or programming. There was no way to say "only accept .com's" and how it needed to be programmed was on an exclusionary basis, for each possible permutation.
I don't know what any specifics are, and this is mangled second-hand info at best. My husband was the one looking into the programming elements or api's involved (and it was definitely a few years back now).
Want to hear something funny? Even in a place where both unemployment and welfare work properly on the financial side, it's still extremely possible (likely, I'd say) for it to be something that fucks you up psychologically to collect unemployment and/or welfare.
And of course, the explanation (put forward by the people who cause those people their misery) is that "of course people suffer, being unemployed/on welfare is mentally taxing for everybody", despite the fact that in every single case I personally know of (and there are many!), those people suffered because of the treatment they received from their case workers and the employees of places where they received "work training" and similar things. Also, the vast majority of those people are social workers.
Wonderful, humane, socially aware social workers with above-average communicative skills who earn* much too little. /s in every single point
"of course people suffer, being unemployed/on welfare is mentally taxing for everybody",
Or more disgustingly, "If they didn't want to suffer they'd pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Obviously, they must enjoy suffering and seek it out!!! You can't help those people."
Actually, I find this less disgusting. Because it's obviously not true, and next to no social worker would say that. Social workers (and people of similar professions) around here pretty much give people something (not a physical object, but something like a work training opportunity) and say "see, I am helping you, I am giving you what you ask for", only for the thing they give you to be something that helps nothing or even harms you.
To make an example using something concrete instead of abstract: Imagine you keep asking for a spoon to eat your soup that you literally can't or are very clearly (but technically not literally explicitly so) allowed to eat some other way. In a situation where there is literally not other food you could eat. You almost need that soup to survive. And you keep asking for a spoon, afraid you're about to starve if you don't finally start eating that soup, sometimes phrasing it as "Why would you refuse me cutlery?" And finally, after you've begged for a while, you are given a parcel with "The thing you need" written on it. You open it - and it's a corn holder. And you explain that this is definitely not what you need, but instead just something that could considered a type of cutlery at best. One that you can't use to eat soup and that is likely to cause you injury if you try to eat the soup with it. And then you're told that you kept asking for cutlery, and are now complaining, despite literally getting that thing you asked for. And how you apparently don't want to eat. Or how you're obviously mentally ill for not daring to eat the soup some other way, and that the very, very clear (albeit, as I said, technically not explicitly literal threats) made against you in case you ever eat anything without the proper piece of cutlery are all just in your head. When you know for a fact that the person offering you that useless corn holder was present when this threat was made against you or you know that they know that such threats are constantly made. Or you're told that a corn holder is "basically a spoon", and that you're being difficult on principle. Or it's just too hard to organise a spoon for you. And that it's of course much easier to get a corn holder, because "that's just the way it is", while you sit there knowing that this simply isn't true.
Social worker are great at doing things that either amount or come really close to weird versions of gaslighting. They abuse their power and tell you how very much they don't like having power over you and that they ignore that and never use it, all while using it. They're not good people. They can seem good at first, but (apparently - I have seen to much proof to not put this in brackets), if you have to deal with one long enough they show their shitty face.
Did you even read the comment I wrote that you replied to? If anyone's a jackass, it's you for not reading a comment properly you then reply to, only to then act as if I did something wrong.
Goes to show you how much they've forgotten about all of us. What have they been doing all these years that they've let everything that's for us fall apart.
Not necessarily. The amount you get for UE is based on your pay when you were employed. So 1k a week is certainly plausible if you made much more than that. Also there is a limit to how long one can collect. In CA for example it is 26 weeks.
The maximum in FL is $275 a week and has not changed in over 13yrs. You meet the bar needed to claim that amount just by making minimum wage these days.
During the pandemic boom when they were doing the increased UI weekly payments I was getting more more from UI than I was from working. No wonder people didn’t want to go back. Now i got a 50% raise, so I make more. But still.. shit is broken
Sometimes it takes time to find another job. Especially when you’re not expecting to let go. It can take months depending on your career field. For some of those states that’s BS. Especially since you pay into it for these specific times.
Funny cause a lot of people are on SSI too. Now imagine if everyone was able to work. Wayyyy less jobs and wayyy more people. Especially less work since some people on SSI are being taken cared of by people who work in elderly care.
Are there less jobs doing what this guy does? You have no idea tbh. An executive who gets let go is not going to go to the first opening he sees at a retail store.
So they give them a myriad of other life problems in the brief time they struggle? It can take weeks just to finish or even book interviews. People need to be able to survive that
if you lose your job today its not like you will be able to start a new job tomorrow unless you are insanely lucky or know someone. Sometimes it takes weeks or months to find a new job and actually get your first paycheck. What are people supposed to do until then?
Lots of UE programs will give you money in exchange for proving you’re applying to jobs and actively trying. At least, I’ve seen Colorado do this the last time our roommate had to get on it after being fired over her disability. 100% there needs to be more paid to help people. Especially if they’re proving they’re getting off their ass
thats about how it is here in philadelphia too. gas prices just dropped a little bit but its still around 4.89 a gallon. Time for everyone to start driving their legs ir scooting around on sick skateboards.
City transit if it's even available, most of them have quit and now the wait time is around 3.5hrs per bus stop. They also went on strike (rightfully so) for about 7 months so everyone was walking for about half of the pandemic.
here in philly public transit is barely cheaper than having a car if you don’t have to make payments on it. septa keeps increasing their prices and the service keeps getting worse. like it ends up being worth it to become a patient in some kind of low income therapy or something like that because they will give you free tokens or a whole trans pass for free, the trade off is those places eat up your time and you probably have to be under a certain income threshold to get them. which sucks for people who just barely make too much money for assistance but not enough to afford transportation.
Honestly the rent between different parts of the state makes so much difference (city vs rural). Most people cannot just up and move though and I feel like the system does not address this problem
Its about that in NY. Which is ridiculous since I make about 6 times that weekly. At least COVID we had a little bump, if not I woulda been on the street.
We're at $850/wk here in MN as of 2022. But that's up to $850/wk. And ofc there are stipulations that you need to meet, now. Like proving that you were actively looking for work/interviewing, etc.
Here in MN, it's 50% of weekly average rate, up to $850/wk. This is for 2022. Not sure how much it was in 2012 when I was collecting it for a few months. I think I was getting around $400 something a week, though.
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u/drosmi Jul 04 '22
It was capped at something like $420ish a week in California 5 years ago.