How much money is actually saved? And what does this do to enforcement? The IRS doesn’t issue unemployment checks, so now we need the DOL (in each state) to work with the IRS and state tax agencies to determine prior year income before sending out unemployment checks?
And for how many people? Is there actually a glut of millionaires claiming unemployment to the point where this is meaningful savings?
And is the bill indexed to inflation? 1 million dollars today won’t be the same as 1 million dollars in 2070. Are you sure congress will keep up with inflation (see: minimum wage).
This bill sounds nice, but isn’t actually solving a problem. I’d much rather millionaires and billionaires benefit from social programs than adding arbitrary tests to keep them out. Because every time we add those dumb arbitrary tests we end up with situations like medicaid where the qualifying income for “low income” doesn’t change effectively cutting out people that 20 years ago would have qualified.
And these checks all add administrative bureaucracy which almost always balloons the cost.
I can speak to this personally. I have a child with a severe disability who qualifies for the katie beckett program. Normally, my income pushes me out of qualification for medicaid, however, katie beckett allows for children with severe disabilities to enter medicaid (fantastic). To get there, however, I had to apply for medicaid twice. The first to go through the system and get denied and the second time with the denial to qualify my child for the program (nuts, I know). After that, I now have to do 6 month qualification interviews with the insurance company the state uses to administer the program and 6 month interviews with a nurse to make sure that, yes, indeed severe disabilities do not go away. Imagine all the paperwork and admin costs going into making sure I’m not abusing the system? It’s not a short process either, it took several months just to qualify.
That’s not the end of the craziness either. Once my child turns 18, they’ll qualify for social security and medicaid. However, that’s only if they have less than $2000 in assets. That limit? Set in 1970 when we allowed people with disabilities to use medicare. We didn’t want “rich” kids abusing the system so we put in a means test. Which would be approximately $15k if it were indexed to inflation, but it wasn’t. This makes it really hard for someone with a disability to function in society. They basically have to live like paupers if they also want medical care.