i have a grandmother who's not much younger than the woman in the video and who nobody doubts will live to be 100. she worked her whole life as a bank teller and retired with a sufficient pension. however, inflation has eaten into the pension and she now also gets government money. she's doing ok right now, but the longer she lives the more likely she is to find herself in a situation where she has to choose between rent and food.
is it that out of the blue to think her son bought her the car but won't or can't give her a monthly check? well, the answer to that may actually lie in the accounting laws of the state - the "tough on welfare" laws that have become exceedingly strict since the late 90s. i live in ontario, which is ridiculously progressive with public subsidies compared to almost anywhere else on the continent, and i can tell you that, here, a monthly amount would be treated as income and deducted from assistance. however, a gift can get around that problem.
so, let's say she needs $1000 to pay her monthly expenses (rent, food, rx, utilities. etc) and only gets $700 from combined pension and government assistance. that scenario is extremely common and absolutely reasonable to assume is probably the cause of her panhandling. if her son were to give her $300 a month, they'd probably reduce the government part of her pension by almost as much. this is a result of the "tough on welfare" approach; the assumption is that if she's getting money from another source, she must be ripping off the system. in order for her to get the $1000, she'd basically have to get off assistance altogether. however, there's a huge difference between giving your elderly mother $300/month and giving her $1000/month. the latter could very well be outside of the son's actual budget.
a new car is probably over the yearly limit for gifts, which is probably less than $5000. however, buying a car and leaving it in the son's name and letting her drive it (and then maybe giving it to a teenager a few years down the road) is entirely legal.
i'm reading into things a lot, but this guy should have given her the opportunity to explain before he started yelling at her. the system that elderly people have to wade through to generate enough money to pay for the things they need is full of ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy (made far more restrictive by welfare reform) that are designed with the assumption that everybody is a cheat. she might be able to live comfortably with the state and her son splitting the cost, but the state makes it very difficult for that kind of arrangement to happen.
