The Holes In the Net: Where Social Programs Fail
Social safety nets are great—when they work.
Social safety nets are critical in modern society.
If we are to judge the effectiveness of our governments and the functioning of our communities, we need to examine how we treat those who are struggling the most.
We often make the mistake of judging the health of our nations by corporate wealth and profits, the GDP of the country as a whole. But no society can be called great if the number of people on the street exceeds the number who can afford to buy a home.
For a more accurate picture of a country’s well-being, we must consider the cost of living, inflation rates, and hourly wages. We have to look at what life looks like for the average citizen, not those at the top of the ladder.
We need to think about access to healthcare, mental healthcare, food, and shelter. If nothing else, we can hopefully all agree that everyone deserves a fair shot at survival.
I live in Canada, but I often talk about The United States because it serves as an excellent case study on this subject—and, also, because many of my loved ones and close friends live over our southern border.
These things impact the people I care about, and I get to hear a lot about their struggles and the issues they face with their system.
But regardless of where we live, we’re all humans. We all have the same basic needs. And in a capitalist society like we have here in North America, these things are often locked behind a paywall.
As a result of this, the poor can sometimes have a hard time accessing the necessities of life. Hygiene products, food, clean drinking water, and a safe place to sleep are things a lot of us can comfortably take for granted, but many others are forced to go without.
Thankfully, there are a lot of programs in place to help people who need it, especially in a country as wealthy as The United States.
But it’s important to remember that while many people can successfully land in the net when they fall, others don’t. It’s called a net because it has holes in it, after all.
Some of those holes are just big enough to let somebody down.
A lot of the safety nets that we depend on these days have a fatal flaw. We base access to aid on a person’s reported income, regardless of what their life looks like in person.
We base it on a spreadsheet of limited data and don’t consider their real-life circumstances.
Take for example the National School Lunch Program in the United States. It’s a fantastic program; it helps provide millions of school children in low-income households with a reliable daily meal.
Your eligibility for this program is dependent on your income versus the number of people in your household. If you’re on SNAP benefits or other government-provided financial assistance, your kids automatically qualify.
Pretty great, right? For the most part. There’s a wrinkle in the formula. It’s a glaringly obvious one, and all you need is a little common sense to spot it.
Not every family of four, as they use in the equation, needs the same amount of income to survive.
A family of four that comprises a nuclear family—two working parents and two kids—will use their money very differently than a single mother living with her aging parents and one child.
And that’s assuming everyone is in good health.
What if someone in the household has a serious illness, and the family is saddled with debt and expensive medications? What if someone has student loans, problems with addictions, or a disability that prevents them from working?
If you take a look at the prototype application form for 2023, you’ll see that while they request your income and household members, there is no space to explain whether that income is actually enough to support you.
To quote The Education Data Initiative page about school lunch debt:
Children unable to afford a proper meal are defined as being food-insecure; they lack reliable access to food. Many of those children who owe school meal debt are part of families who earn too much to be considered for free or reduced lunch, but also earn too little to afford regular school meals.
In other words, a lot of those children are falling through the holes in the net.
While we’re on the subject, let’s take a look at the SNAP program, shall we? What used to be called the good ol’ fashioned food stamps.
Unfortunately, it carries all of the same problems as the school lunch programs. It’s based on income, not practical needs. There’s a fairly substantial gap between the people who need help and the people who can receive it.
The issues that contribute to this gap are wide-ranging. Lack of eligibility information, a convoluted application system that’s difficult to navigate, the so-called ‘birthday cliff’ for kids in low-income families, and even medical expense deduction limits.
If you read through the results of the study linked above, you might have caught an interesting line.
Approximately 4.2 million low-income U.S. households including someone with disabilities are food insecure. Of these, 1.4 million were not participating in SNAP and another 2.8 million households were food insecure despite participating in SNAP.
Yes, you read that right. Even some people who receive SNAP benefits are still not able to keep hunger pangs at bay. The benefits as currently calculated are often not enough to get a family through the whole month.
During the Pandemic, the United States government implemented a temporary increase to the benefits eligible people could receive. That has now ended, and at the same time, the cost of food is rising. People are making do with fewer meals and smaller portions to make ends meet.
In 2024, there were some alterations to the SNAP program to try and mend some of these gaps. To reflect inflation, the income requirement has decreased slightly.
At the same time, they added additional employment requirements for older age groups without dependents. Part of the so-called ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act.’
The system is amazing when it works, but like other safety nets, it has holes.
Those holes were bad enough without bad actors taking scissors to the threads.
You know I have to touch on disability benefits.
This one grinds my gears on a very personal level, being an autistic woman with arthritis. I haven’t been on disability myself, but I’ve heard some horror stories from my friends in the U.S.A.
The problems with disability benefits often come down to plain old administrative burdens. It’s just freaking difficult to maintain the lifestyle, paperwork, and income level that allows you to keep the benefits that you need to survive.
It’s not uncommon for the requirements of paperwork and filing to just change, often with no warning or information being sent to the people accessing those benefits. People can wind up losing their assistance out of the clear blue, with no idea what they did wrong.
The application process for it can be brutal, leaving recipients in the lurch for weeks, months, or even years while they struggle to be acknowledged as human beings who just need help.
Oh, and be prepared to constantly have to justify yourself to everybody.
Your disability will frequently be questioned, poked, and prodded to see if you ‘really need the help,’ and there are going to be people who judge the heck out of you for it.
They do that for everyone receiving any kind of financial assistance, but if you have an invisible disability, the grilling is especially harsh. Do you know how many times I’ve had someone say, “You don’t look autistic!” or “Are you sure? I would never have known!”
Now imagine the person saying that to you is the person deciding whether you’re disabled enough to get help buying food.
In some cases, even the simple act of getting married to the person you love can result in you losing your benefits too. Your spouse’s income becomes part of the calculation, and that can bump you right out of your assistance bracket.
Until legislation to remove these barriers passes, many people on disability are denied equal marriage rights. They’re forced to either forgo the joy of a wedding or try to survive on one income.
Not to worry, the holes in these nets are big enough to accommodate a wheelchair.
With the gaps and pitfalls inherent to the system, federal assistance in the United States can feel more like a spider’s web than a true safety net.
You get caught up in the minutiae and you never get enough to break out of the cycle of poverty that kicked you off the ledge to begin with. It isn’t much better in Canada, unfortunately. Our system has been cut to ribbons and needs a lot of shoring up.
I could keep talking forever. I could talk about issues of racism and its impacts on poverty and the wealth gap. I could talk about policies that directly and actively tear these holes even wider than they need to be.
I could talk about how anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination factors in, I could talk about political gerrymandering and lobbying, and how it screws over the working poor who need the most help.
I could rant about a lack of empathy and will on the part of politicians to do anything about it.
There’s so much more I could say about all of this. But I’ll settle for saying this: it doesn’t need to be this way.
We’re all used to this being the way the world works, but that’s only because we accept it. We live in democratic countries, at least for the moment. We should use that democracy to its fullest extent.
We should remind ourselves that we’re the real bosses here, and we have the right to demand more, and better than we currently have.
We need to look past the numbers and see what the people behind them are going through. Then, and only then, will we be able to truly help.
There are holes in the social safety net, but they can be repaired.
Solidarity wins.