The thing that libs don't realize about means testing
...is that it is insanely annoying!!
I am now signed up for unemployment insurance in the state of California. I spent a lot of time on the phone recently trying to submit and the correct my application for it. This is the first time I have been laid off in my life (I had a 15 year streak of dodging layoffs by leaving for a new job immediately before they occurred!) and therefore this is the first time I have been eligible for UI in any part of the US.
I've been against aggressive means-testing for a long time because it seems stupid, unfair, and a waste of energy to restrict our social safety net programs with massive bureaucratic surveillance programs. I knew from my friends that it is also unbelievably annoying; I now have that experience myself. It is actually more annoying than doing my taxes, which is crazy. (I'd assumed that it would be about exactly as annoying as doing my taxes.)
The forms are huge, the websites are oddly laid-out, and everything is written in the strangest, densest language possible. The phone trees are word puzzles - every verbal question they pose will have multiple long asides referring to possible exceptions, often listing out specific document names or federal programs. By the time the phone tree completes a question, I sometimes have a hard time remembering how the sentence began.
I had the experience of being manually marked as "unable or unwilling to work full time", which I needed to call and correct; the guy at the EDD office had no idea why I'd been marked that way and simply manually reversed it. This is when I learned that my ability or willingness to work within the CA unemployment insurance system is not something that I can attest to positively myself, as the worker in question; it's something that a stranger at the back of the EDD tech decides about me and manually inputs after reviewing my material.
Anyway, I was on the phone solving that and other problems for hours. Amazing!
That's the whole blog post today: means testing is more annoying than doing your taxes. In my experience, it was about exactly as annoying as getting challenged by health insurance. On a stress level, it is even comparable to the time that airport security tried to take all my diabetes equipment away from me, which was possibly the most terrifying and morally objectionable bureaucratic challenge I've navigated in my life. (I was, I think, sixteen.) That's it! That's the post!!