{"id":26,"date":"2026-06-17T22:50:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T22:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onehandup.net\/?p=26"},"modified":"2026-06-18T00:15:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T00:15:40","slug":"the-safety-net-shouldnt-have-an-on-off-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onehandup.net\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"The Safety Net Shouldn’t Have an On\/Off Switch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few years ago I read a comment that has never really left me. It went something like this: if a politician can’t relate to \u2014 or at the very least understand \u2014 the struggle in the song “Fast Car,” they probably shouldn’t be elected.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you know the song, you know exactly what that means. Tracy Chapman wrote about a working-class narrator who is doing everything right and still can’t get ahead. She’s checking out groceries, looking after a parent who drinks, carrying a partner who won’t pull his weight, and holding onto the idea that a fast car and a little momentum might finally be the ticket out. By the end of the song the dream hasn’t arrived. The cycle just keeps turning. It’s one of the most honest portraits of being poor in America ever put to music, and the reason it still hits people thirty-plus years later is that it isn’t about a stereotype. It’s about thin margins. It’s about how close to the edge a lot of perfectly hardworking people actually live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the lens I want to bring to something I’ve been chewing on for a while: how much a person’s access to basic services \u2014 food assistance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid \u2014 can swing depending on who happens to be sitting in the White House and which party controls Congress. Not whether these programs should exist. Not whether they should ever change. But whether it’s acceptable that millions of people can wake up one morning and find the ground has shifted under them because of an election they may not have even voted in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t think it is. And I don’t think you have to be on any particular side of the aisle to agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we’re actually talking about<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let’s put real faces and numbers on this, because the abstractions hide the stakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SNAP<\/strong> (food stamps) feeds roughly 42 million Americans \u2014 about 1 in 8 people in this country. Almost 40% of them are kids. A big share are seniors and people with disabilities. The average benefit is somewhere around $187 per person per month. That’s not a luxury. That’s the difference between a full cart and an empty one at the end of the month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Security<\/strong> sends checks to more than 70 million people. For a lot of retirees it isn’t “extra” \u2014 it’s the floor they’re standing on. The average monthly retirement benefit in 2026 is a little over $2,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Medicare and Medicaid<\/strong> together cover well over 100 million Americans \u2014 older folks, low-income families, people with disabilities, a huge chunk of the nursing-home population, and a lot of working people who’d be one bad diagnosis away from bankruptcy without it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These aren’t fringe programs for “other people.” They’re the cashier in “Fast Car.” They’re your neighbor, your aunt, the veteran down the street, somebody’s grandmother. A lot of us are one layoff, one diagnosis, or one bad year away from needing them ourselves. I think people forget that part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn’t hypothetical \u2014 it already happened<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the moment that crystallized all of this for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November 2025<\/strong>, during the government shutdown, SNAP benefits lapsed for the first time in the program’s roughly sixty-year history.<\/em> Not “got smaller.” Lapsed. More than 40 million people were told their benefits might simply not load that month. States scrambled. Food banks were openly saying they couldn’t come close to filling the gap \u2014 in a lot of places SNAP delivers something like nine meals for every one a food bank provides. Federal judges had to step in and rule that the pause was likely unlawful, pointing out that Congress had set aside billions in contingency money for exactly this kind of situation. Eventually the money moved, but families went days and weeks not knowing whether they could buy groceries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sit with that. Whatever your politics, in the richest country on earth, tens of millions of people spent part of a month not knowing if they could feed their kids \u2014 because of a standoff in Washington. The food existed. The money existed. The need existed. The only thing missing was a guarantee that the switch couldn’t be flipped off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the shutdown wasn’t the only thing happening to the safety net in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big budget reconciliation law signed in July 2025 made the largest cuts to SNAP in its history<\/strong> \u2014 roughly $186 billion over ten years, about a 20% cut. It expanded work-reporting requirements to people up to age 64, to parents of kids 14 and older, and stripped existing exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and young adults aging out of foster care. For the first time ever, it pushes a share of benefit costs onto the states, which means some states may cut their programs or pull back. The Urban Institute estimated that more than 22 million families would lose some or all of their food assistance, with the average affected family losing around $146 a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same law made the largest Medicaid cuts in history<\/strong> \u2014 somewhere around $900 billion to $1 trillion over ten years \u2014 mostly through new work-reporting requirements starting in 2027. The Congressional Budget Office estimated about 10 million more people uninsured by 2034. Some independent estimates run higher, in part because we already know from Arkansas and Georgia that these reporting systems knock eligible people off the rolls through paperwork and red tape, not because they actually stopped qualifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Social Security<\/strong> is sitting on its own cliff. The 2026 Trustees Report, released just this June, moved up the projected depletion date of the retirement trust fund to late 2032. If Congress does nothing before then, the law triggers an automatic across-the-board cut of roughly 22% \u2014 landing on something like 70 million people at once. That’s around $500 a month gone from the average retiree’s check, overnight, by default.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is doomsday prophecy. It’s pulled straight from CBO, the Social Security Trustees, and nonpartisan research shops. It’s the system working exactly as it’s currently built \u2014 which is the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real issue isn’t one party. It’s the volatility.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a “the other side did this” piece, and that misses the point entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, the 2025 cuts came from one party in power. But the deeper pattern is bipartisan, and it cuts both ways. These programs were built by both parties and expanded by both parties. Social Security came from FDR; Medicare and Medicaid from LBJ; but the modern food stamp program was signed by Nixon, and the most important Social Security rescue in modern history was a Reagan<\/em> deal. The reason Social Security is staring down a 2032 cliff right now isn’t one villain \u2014 it’s about forty years of both<\/em> parties knowing the math and choosing to kick the can rather than take a hard vote. Everyone in Washington has known the rough deadline since the early 2010s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the thing I actually want to fix isn’t “which party is right.” It’s that the safety net currently behaves like it has a light switch in the Oval Office. Flip the switch, and millions of lives change. That’s not a left or right problem. That’s a design flaw. A retiree who paid in for forty years, or a working mom doing everything “Fast Car” describes, shouldn’t have to read election returns to know whether she can eat next month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don’t run anything else important this way. We don’t rewire the power grid every four years. We don’t tear up the interstate when the mayor changes. We treat that stuff as infrastructure \u2014 things you can improve and maintain, but not yank out from under people on a whim. Core benefits that tens of millions of people have literally planned their lives around deserve the same treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The “Fast Car” test<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This is where that comment comes back around for me. The point of the “Fast Car” test isn’t that every politician needs to have been poor. It’s that they need to be able to picture it<\/em> \u2014 to understand, in their gut, that for a huge number of Americans there is no cushion. No emergency fund. No family money to fall back on. When you actually understand that, you stop treating $146 a month or a 22% benefit cut as a line item, and you start treating it as the thing standing between a real person and going hungry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A leader who can hold that picture in their head will still make hard budget choices \u2014 there will always be hard choices \u2014 but they’ll make them with warning, with ramps, and with a floor under everyone. A leader who can’t<\/em> picture it will treat the safety net like a bargaining chip, because to them it’s abstract. The test isn’t about empathy as a personality trait. It’s about whether someone understands the stakes well enough to be trusted with the switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how do we actually fix this?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the part I care about most, because complaining is easy and I’d rather talk solutions. The good news is we don’t have to invent anything from scratch. We’ve done this before, and the playbook is sitting right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1983, Social Security was months<\/em> from not being able to pay full benefits. Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill \u2014 about as far apart politically as you could get \u2014 set up a bipartisan commission (the Greenspan Commission), agreed on the same set of facts, and cut a deal that mixed tax increases and benefit changes. Crucially, they phased everything in.<\/em> The retirement-age increase didn’t touch a single person for 17 years. Reagan, signing it, said the promise was to “protect beneficiaries against any loss in current benefits.” Senator Moynihan’s line during the negotiations has stuck with me: everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. That deal held the program together for two generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the model. Here’s what I think real guardrails look like, in plain terms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Never let benefits actually lapse.<\/strong> After November 2025, this should be non-negotiable. Fully fund a contingency reserve \u2014 analysts have pegged it around $8\u20139 billion for SNAP \u2014 so that even during a shutdown or a fight in Washington, a full month of benefits keeps flowing. The people at the bottom should never be the hostages in a budget standoff. Ever.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Phase in any cut, and grandfather the people already on it.<\/strong> If a future change is needed, fine \u2014 but give people real time to adjust, the way 1983 did. Nobody who is currently relying on a benefit and planned their life around it should have the rug pulled mid-stride.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Make the math honest before the vote.<\/strong> Require an independent, public score (CBO or equivalent) of exactly how many people lose coverage or benefits before<\/em> anything passes. If a bill knocks 10 million people off their health insurance, that number should be on the table in plain sight, not buried.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Raise the bar for stripping eligibility from millions at once.<\/strong> A change that removes coverage or food assistance from millions of people shouldn’t be doable on a party-line squeaker through a budget loophole. Make big eligibility rollbacks require either a real supermajority or a long advance-notice period. Friction is a feature when the stakes are this high.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. Protect the automatic stabilizers.<\/strong> One of SNAP’s best design features is that it expands automatically when a recession hits and more people need help, then shrinks when things recover. That counter-cyclical reflex is exactly what you want. Don’t break it by shoving costs onto states that have to balance their budgets in a downturn \u2014 that turns a shock absorber into a trapdoor.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Index to reality.<\/strong> Tie benefits to actual costs \u2014 real food prices, real inflation \u2014 instead of letting them quietly erode while groceries and rent climb. A benefit that doesn’t keep up with reality is a cut you just didn’t have to vote for.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Use bipartisan, fact-locked commissions for the big structural fixes.<\/strong> Social Security’s 2032 problem is solvable, and there are plenty of options on the table \u2014 adjusting the payroll-tax cap, modest tax tweaks, targeted changes for the highest earners, gradual adjustments phased in over decades. The 1983 deal proved that when both sides agree on the facts and share the political risk, the impossible becomes possible. Waiting only makes the eventual fix more painful.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Notice what isn’t<\/em> on that list: “freeze these programs forever and never change anything.” That’s not what I’m arguing for, and I don’t think it’s realistic. Demographics change. Costs change. The economy changes. There absolutely needs to be room to adjust, pivot, and modernize. The whole point of guardrails isn’t to prevent steering \u2014 it’s to keep the car on the road. You can still change lanes. You just can’t drive everybody off a cliff overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The bottom line<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Strip away all the policy and you’re left with something simple. In a country this wealthy, a person’s ability to put food on the table, see a doctor, or keep the lights on in retirement shouldn’t be a coin flip tied to an election. We can debate the size, the cost, the work rules, the trade-offs \u2014 that’s healthy, and we should. But the floor<\/em> should be stable. Nobody should have to figure out how to feed their kids next week because of who won last November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That’s the real “Fast Car” test, I think. Not whether a leader can quote the song, but whether they understand that for a whole lot of Americans, the margins really are that thin \u2014 and that the safety net is supposed to be exactly that. A net. Something you can count on being there when you fall, no matter who’s in charge when you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We’ve built the thing. We just forgot to take the on\/off switch off the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n\n\n\n

    Sources and further reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
      \n
    • SNAP shutdown lapse (Nov 2025):<\/strong> NPR; Deseret News; News From The States<\/em> shutdown timeline.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • 2025 reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21) SNAP cuts:<\/strong> Congressional Budget Office; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Urban Institute; Congressional Research Service (R48552).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Medicaid cuts and coverage loss:<\/strong> Congressional Budget Office; KFF; Georgetown Center for Children and Families; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Social Security 2032 cliff:<\/strong> 2026 Social Security Trustees Report (SSA); Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Bipartisan Policy Center; AARP.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • The 1983 Social Security reform:<\/strong> Reagan Library (signing remarks); Brookings; Urban Institute; the Dole Institute.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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