Hey readers,

In a couple of weeks, the US will start sending out monthly checks to the vast majority of American parents.

This is an idea I’ve been writing about for a long time: Most other rich countries have a policy like this (known as a “child allowance”). If these expanded child tax credit checks get to everyone eligible for them, they could slash child poverty in America by about 40 percent.

Now that checks are about to go out, it feels like that policy is finally getting the attention it deserves. So I wanted to spend a bit talking about another relatively quiet item on the Democratic agenda that could have a big effect on poverty: boosting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits.

SSI is not one of the better-known US safety net programs. It was passed into law in 1972, after President Richard Nixon tried and failed to get Congress to adopt his “guaranteed annual income” plan: essentially a kind of basic income payment that would have given the poorest households in America a guaranteed cash benefit.

That plan ran into conservative opposition, but its opponents acceded to two more modest proposals.

One was the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives working adults (especially those with children) a larger tax refund tied to how much they’ve worked.

The other was SSI, which was meant to help those the EITC didn’t catch: disabled, blind, and elderly Americans who were living in poverty.

Many people in those categories qualify for Social Security payments, because they’ve paid into old-age and disability insurance in their working life.

But many others — people under 18, or adults never able to work — don’t qualify for Social Security. Even many who do qualify for Social Security are still low-income enough to qualify for additional payments from SSI: about a third of SSI’s 7.8 million recipients are also on Social Security.

The point of SSI, in theory, is to make sure no permanently and severely disabled Americans, no blind Americans, and no Americans over the age of 65 are living in poverty.

In practice, the program helps a lot but falls short of that goal.

How SSI has been falling short

In 2021, the maximum SSI benefit for an individual is $9,530.12 per year. The poverty line for a single person is $12,880 — meaning SSI, at most, brings recipients up to less than three-quarters of the poverty line.

It gets worse, though. Let's say you're an SSI recipient married to another recipient, what's called an "eligible couple." You could both be retirees in your 70s, or disabled/blind people earlier in life.

You don't get to add your benefit amounts together. Instead, you have to share a maximum benefit of $14,293.61, only 50 percent more than the individual benefit. The effect is a really dramatic marriage penalty.

Late last May, Joe Biden announced his campaign’s disability policy platform, which included major expansions of SSI benefits. He would set the maximum benefit at 100 percent of the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in benefits over the status quo. He would also eliminate the marriage penalty and let couples keep their full benefits.

There’s more. Currently SSI is limited to people with assets of less than $2,000, or $3,000 for couples. That means many seniors who have even a small amount of retirement savings, as well as disabled people with nest eggs, aren’t eligible.

Biden would more than double the asset limit for individuals and nearly triple it for couples. I'd personally prefer getting rid of the asset test altogether, as it encourages people to spend down every bit of savings they have to qualify for the benefit, but raising it is an improvement.

Recently Biden has faced a strong push from his allies in Congress to include these changes in the huge $6 trillion spending package Democrats are planning to pass this summer or fall.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a first-term Congress member from New York, and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown are leading the charge, with figures like Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders and Finance Chair Ron Wyden on board.

This group in April sent a letter to Biden signed by 18 senators and 33 members of the House urging him to make expanded SSI a priority.

Major parts of the Democratic coalition, like the AFL-CIO union federation and the American Association of Retired People (AARP), are on board, and the changes have overwhelming public support.

These changes could, like the child allowance checks, have a major impact on poverty in America. Combined with other Social Security proposals by Biden, the Urban Institute estimates the changes would lift 1.4 million elderly or disabled people out of poverty this year.

And if they happen alongside the child checks, they’d cement Biden's first term as a period that saw some of the biggest changes to the American safety net in decades.

—Dylan Matthews, @dylanmatt