sudo-nym comments on low stress employment/ munchkin income thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (82)
If you are in the United States, you may want to consider applying for disability. This is ethically questionable if you can support yourself working. It may or may not be a rational economic decision: see below.
Pros:
Cons:
I suspect that disability is set up, without anyone being at fault, such that the vast majority of the economic incentives prevent you from improving yourself further. A more sustainable program to replace disability on the national scale, one that would not actively discourage going to work or training, would resemble a basic income-type system. Unfortunately, such a program does not currently exist in the United States. (More realistically given the general political climate here, percentage disability ratings like the VA uses would be a sustainability improvement, if they could be implemented fairly.)
I believe that it is at least somewhat ethically justifiable to take advantage of disability if you qualify for it and your disability is significantly impacting your ability to work (even if it does not prevent you from working entirely), because there is no better system in place. However, just because I may be able to justify it to myself (I do not currently collect disability, and am currently agonizing about whether I should) does not mean that you will be able to. Please make your own decisions.
I'm on disability, and the resource limit is indeed $2000 (I don't know if that's across the board, or just in my state). I wasn't sure how much attention they pay to Paypal until you mentioned it specifically.
In my case, every dollar of income would cost 50 cents of SSI, so any job that earns less than $1260/month is probably not worth it. However, what I've read indicates that this rule is specific to blindness, and the system is less forgiving to other disabilities.
And I have student loan debt that costs more each month than my disability check, and my parents have been moving away from making that sustainable (at the current rate, I should be overdrawing from my checking account by the end of the year; I was expecting this to happen much sooner, but my parents paid much more of the bills in the first few months of 2013). This prevents "withdraw some cash to hide from the IRS" from being a viable strategy.
Without the loans, however, I could both live on SSI and have money left over for other things, assuming I was efficient with electricity and eating. The amount received depends on how many people you're living with, marriage status, property/car/stock ownership, etc.
It wouldn't only look like tax evasion but effectively be tax evasion.
You might do some online work that pays you in bitcoins.
This is only liquid assets right? A car wouldn't count against that?
I have no anxiety disorder. I'm okay with doing freelance but don't think I'm skilled enough. This could buy me some time to solve that problem until I get really good at webdev or poker or something. On the other hand, an acquaintence had trouble getting disability, and she's very bipolar and prone to full blown manic episodes, pyschotic breaks, etc. so I'm unsure of my chances of even getting it, even if I do decide I want to. I feel a bit guilty about considering it but the possibility of becoming financially independent later assuages my guilt somewhat. Can you elaborate on what qualifies in practice or link to something?