The value of a dollar
by Dave Munger A typical conversation about money with my stepbrother goes something like this: I ask how things are going, then he tells me something that has gone wrong. His TV is broken. One of his teeth is disintegrating and he needs to go the the dentist, but it's not covered by Medicare. Mark's…
Emergency Management
Are marathons worth it?
Inflation for you, but not for me
by Dave Munger Whenever I call my stepbrother Mark, one of his persistent complaints is how prices are going up. “Everything costs more,” he tells me. Yet for the past two years, he's received no increase in his Social Security Disability check. His money, which never went very far, now barely seems to be enough…
Necessary Luxury
by Dave Munger It's almost impossible to come up with a pithy statement summarizing the age-old struggle to define “art” and “artist.” Yet for my stepbrother Mark, for whom daily existence is a struggle, wrestling with these concepts takes on a new dimension. I can still remember scoffing in my Intro to Art class in…
Where it hurts
When most people think of back problems they think of “slipped disks” or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The…
Selling a disability
If you’re an American and you have a job, you’re supposed to get an annual statement from the Social Security Administration explaining how much money you stand to receive at retirement. It also reports what your dependents will get from the SSA if you die, and what you’ll get if you become disabled. For me, the statement is a stark reminder of how much I rely on my wife’s income to survive. As a writer, my income is sporadic, and if I couldn’t work, I’d have a difficult time living on my Social Security benefits alone. Many people see the Social Security program as a sort of charity, but fundamentally it is not: The more you put in, the more you get back from it. If a person hasn’t made much money, they won’t be able to collect enough benefits from Social Security to live on. But even when people do pay in, the system has made it nearly impossible for some people to receive the benefits they deserve. For physical laborers, the very work they do can end up causing disabilities that prevent them from working. My stepbrother Mark had always had a bad back, but he’d dealt with the problem by loading up on Advil and taking an occasional day off. He never visited a doctor about the problem because his jobs never provided health coverage. Often, before starting a job, his boss would pull him aside and remind him that he was not an employee; he was an “independent contractor,” which meant that the boss wasn’t responsible for any injuries or other problems that occurred on the job site. There was no health coverage, no unemployment insurance, no safety net at all, physical or financial. Once Mark was working on a makeshift bit of scaffolding in the cavernous great room of a partially-completed McMansion. He was 30 feet above the rough plywood floor, balancing on a narrow plank, attaching blocks to the rafters with a nail gun so heavy it was difficult for him to hold it over his head, weakened as he was by his deteriorating back. A nail got caught in the gun, causing it to backfire; the 15-pound piece of equipment glanced off the ceiling before crashing down on his face. The blow cracked a tooth and nearly knocked him unconscious. He’s still not sure how he managed to stay on that plank. If he had fallen—supposing he managed to survive—he would have had no way to pay his medical bills.