{"id":34759,"date":"2013-03-26T11:30:48","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T15:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34759"},"modified":"2013-03-26T11:48:23","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T15:48:23","slug":"federal-fiscal-follies-part-iii-revisited-the-disability-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34759","title":{"rendered":"Federal Fiscal Follies, Part III (Revisited) – The Disability Scam"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written about this problem before<\/a> here at TAH. \u00a0And I knew then the problem was bad.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t realize how bad the problem had become.\u00a0 The problem is far bigger than I thought originally.<\/p>\n

When all costs are totaled, the Federal government is now spending more to support those who are \u201cdisabled\u201d than it is on classic \u201cwelfare\u201d and food stamps \u2013 combined<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 The government is now making over 14 million <\/i>Social Security disability payments each month<\/i> – or more than 5 million more the nearly 9 million monthly payments I noted in my previous article.<\/p>\n

The problem seems to be getting worse as the economy “recovers”, too.\u00a0 Since 2009, an average of 100,000 more people are applying for disability each month<\/em> than new jobs are being created. \u00a0And less than 1% of those who became \u201cdisabled\u201d since the beginning of 2011 have returned to the labor force \u2013 in spite of the statutory requirement that a person be unable to perform any type of useful work in order to receive Social Security disability payments at all.<\/p>\n

The overall cost to taxpayers today, including healthcare for these “disabled” folks?\u00a0 Try about $260 billion<\/em><\/strong> – annually.\u00a0 And increasing.<\/p>\n

Oh, and did I mention that people who are drawing \u201cdisability\u201d from the SSA are not even counted as part of the US labor force,<\/i> even if they\u2019re actually able to work in some capacity?\u00a0 God only knows what the US unemployment rate would be if Federal law were enforced<\/a> regarding the criteria for receiving SSA disability payments rather than being widely ignored.\u00a0 But you can bet it would be far higher than it is today.<\/p>\n

A lady from (of all places) NPR \u2013 Chana Joffe-Walt \u2013 has researched the problem in great detail and\u00a0 discusses the issue here<\/a>.\u00a0 IMO her article is definitely worth a read.\u00a0 And it\u2019s depressing as hell.<\/p>\n

Here’s one final bit of “good news”:\u00a0 according to the Social Security chief actuary, the SSA disability insurance program will run out of funds in 2016.\u00a0 That’s about 3 years from now.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, we heard about “welfare queens”.\u00a0 They’re largely gone today.\u00a0 But from what I see, it looks like they’ve been replaced by “disability drones”.<\/p>\n

Damn.\u00a0 Just . . . damn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written about this problem before here at TAH. \u00a0And I knew then the problem was … Federal Fiscal Follies, Part III (Revisited) – The Disability Scam<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}