Assistance Expenditures Per Inhabitant, 1954–55

received additional monthly benefits because of the increase in the exempt amount. Further increases in the exempt amount would undoubtedly continue to be accompanied by even more rapid increases in the proportion of 4-quarter workers, including full-time workers, who would be able to draw benefits. One of the inequities of the retirement test before the 1954 amendments was the dual exemption given to persons with both wages and earnings from self-employment. Such workers represented about 1 percent of all beneficiaries aged 65-74 with earnings from covered employment in 1952. Since the retirement test for wage employment differed from that for self-employment, each test was applied separately to the corresponding category of earnings. Such persons could therefore earn as much as $1,800-$900 in wages and $900 in net earnings from self-employmentduring the year without losing any benefits. As a result, they enjoyed an advantage over other beneficiaries. The data in the survey clearly show the existence of such an advantage (table 3). As a group, beneficiaries with both wages and net earnings from self -employment had higher earnings than other groups of beneficiaries. Yet the former averaged fewer benefit deductions than other beneficiaries at the same level of earnings, especially in the higher brackets. Additional data from the survey supplement the picture drawn in table 3. At earnings levels between $900 and $1,725, 26 percent of the beneficiaries with both wages and self-employment income had no benefit deductions, compared with 4 percent of the beneficiaries with net earnings from self -employment but no covered wages. Of course, at these earnings levels all beneficiaries with wages alone had some deductions. Since the earnings of beneficiaries with both self-employment income and wages were on the whole higher than the earnings of other beneflciaries, the smaller number of beneflt deductions that they generally suffered must reflect the double exemption given them under the dual test. This advantage has disappeared as a result of the 1954 amendments.