DISABILITY POVERTY TRAPS
Part One: This Is Our Money
Poverty is disabling, and disproportionate amounts of disabled people live in poverty. The social safety net that is supposed to ensure a basic floor of safety and stability for all people, including those with disabilities, is built with complicated, bizarre requirements to access and sustain assistance and services, requirements that often force people to stay in precarity and desperate situations to hold on to support. We call these “poverty traps.” Programs that provide cash assistance to people with disabilities regularly include strict (and very low) limits on how much money or savings a person is allowed to have in their bank account. These rules make working, saving, or pursuing anything that could stabilize a person further genuinely risky and precarious. Policymakers have created these conditions intentionally and, through constant reinforcement, maintained them.
In this series we will look at how poverty traps have operated in the disability community and, later, at what better and clear-eyed policies should be worked for going forward. This part focuses on Supplemental Security Income, a program that raises the question of what support every person deserves simply for being alive.
In a moment when we all need more cash, understanding how Supplemental Security Income was designed to be flexible is essential. It proves a simple but powerful point: giving people cash works. What didn’t work, and what needs revisiting now, is how these programs were deliberately structured to create poverty traps, giving people just enough money to survive, but not allowing them to have enough to meaningfully improve their material conditions.
The clearest evidence of this intention is that politicians have kept people on these benefits in poverty year after year. Supplemental Security Income, created in the early 1970s as a federal safety net for the elderly, blind, and disabled, was set below the federal poverty line from the start. Every year since, Congress, across both political parties, session after session, has chosen to keep it there. In 2025, the highest supplemental security income payment for one person was $967, while the poverty line for a single adult was $1,304. These benefits are even more inadequate when considered alongside inflation and the skyrocketing and crushing cost of housing.
The trap is further reinforced by strict savings limits, which block any attempt by people, however small, to save or build toward stability. If you receive Supplemental Security Income due to your disability, you’re not allowed to have more than $2,000 in assets (this means you cannot have more than this in the bank,) or $3,000 if you’re married; otherwise, the Social Security Administration can suspend or take away your cash assistance by monitoring and reviewing the person’s bank statements. For over a million Californians, and millions more nationwide these rules lock them out of stability and keep them trapped in poverty.
Losing Supplemental Security Income doesn’t just mean losing a monthly cash payment. For people with disabilities, personal care services are tied directly to Social Security eligibility. If you lose your Supplemental Security Income benefits, you can also lose the services that keep you alive, the personal care assistance that provides someone to help you eat, get out of bed, get dressed, use the restroom, bathe, take medication, or leave your home safely. These services are only covered by Medicaid, not by an employer-sponsored plan, even for a working disabled person, so losing Supplemental Security Income can mean losing the care that literally makes staying alive possible.
Supplemental Security Income isn’t the only cash assistance program that functions as a poverty trap. California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants exists precisely because many immigrants are excluded from federal Supplemental Security Income, yet it replicates many of the same restrictive rules. Across systems, people are robbed of entitlements, benefits, and programs. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are cut. Healthcare services are denied. Regional center services sit unspent while people go without care.
At the outset we said that poverty itself, and the way our society has chosen to address it, is disabling. If you tell someone that they will lose critical life-sustaining services, that they will die, if they put together more than $2000, you are cruelly and radically restricting their ability to live full and independent lives. This understanding was clearly documented back in 2006 in Dismantling the Poverty Trap, and people have repeatedly rung the alarm since. Yet, politicians across the political spectrum have failed to act: benefits remain below the federal poverty line, proposals to raise the asset limit are repeatedly blocked, and essential needs continue to go unmet. Most Americans are much closer to becoming homeless than to becoming billionaires.
We’ve seen a surge in identity pride movements, and we have seen gains in various kinds of social acceptance and civil protections in our lifetimes, but far fewer gains in the pursuit of economic dignity, partially because the fear and precarity of relying on benefits designed to keep you in poverty is real, consuming, and debilitating. The underlying narrative that allows this fear to thrive is that we are unworthy: scammers and con artists, incompetent and incapable. When so much is at stake, and when the level of surveillance by the Social Security Administration is so intense, staying under the radar becomes the strategy.
These extreme limitations don’t just affect people who self-identify as disabled. Housing, food, health care, family courts, mental health and substance use treatment etc. all have their own poverty traps, and when these systems intersect, a series of financial and emotional catastrophes unfold. Many families face impossible choices in response to these policies: turning to underground economies, taking on debt, separating from loved ones. The dominant narrative blames people for being homeless or poor, claiming they are dysfunctional, mentally ill, or addicts. In reality, it is poverty itself that is disabling. The mental health impacts are not unrelated - they arise from the constant pressure, fear, and psychic drain of navigating this corrupt system.
But this is our money. Social security benefits, housing and food assistance, etc. are funded through our taxes. When people talk about waste and fraud, they usually point at everyday people. But the real waste occurs through destructive and confusing economic policies that hurt people here and around the world. More money is spent trying to catch individual fraud and abuse than it would cost to simply give people what they deserve. The system is the fraudster: benefits locked below the poverty line, asset limits that prevent saving, surveillance, compliance bureaucracy, overpayment errors, clawbacks, price gouging, and inflation applied selectively, only when those in power decide prices should increase. Money is spent everywhere, but rarely on directly giving people what they actually need: cash, housing, and services.
We should respond not with shame about not having enough, but with anger that we were prevented from ever having it. Ending these poverty traps and giving more of the peoples’ own money back to them would put give individuals and communities back control of their own economic security and dignity, their own independence, the full humanity that has always rightfully been theirs.
Carolina Valle, MSW, is DRC’s Director of Power Building. She is a social worker by training with experience in public health social work and traditional public policy. Originally from Los Angeles, she is a founding member of the All People’s Health Collective.
Citations :
Stapleton, D. C., O’Day, B. L., Livermore, G. A., & Imparato, A. J. (2006). Dismantling the poverty trap: Disability policy for the twenty-first century.
Savin, K. (2021). “Playing the game” on SSI and SSDI benefits: How Social Security Administration policy shapes the individual, societal, and communal disability experience (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Berkeley.
Gustafson, K. S. (2012). Cheating welfare: Public assistance and the criminalization of poverty (p. 160; cited on p. 69). NYU Press.
Resources:
WIPA programs offer free and confidential benefits counseling to individuals receiving disability related benefits from Social Security and are working or interested in working. Here is a link to info on WIPA services: Work Incentives Planning and Assistance | The Work Site | SSA
ABLE accounts allow individuals with disabilities to save money in an account that does not impact their benefits. A link to ABLE accounts: Spotlight On Achieving A Better Life Experience (ABLE) Accounts | Supplemental Security Income (SSI) | SSA