Jonah Goldberg had a great editorial April 5, 2013 about the social security disability program.\u00a0 It appeared in the Columbus Dispatch. \u00a0\u00a0If the British experience is any indication, we have 67% of the folks on social security disability that can still work.\u00a0 Goldberg indicated that .65% of theUS workforce in 1960 was on disability.\u00a0 By 2010, it was 5.6% or a 9 fold increase.\u00a0 \u00a0Wow!!\u00a0 Looking at the Office and Management Budget website (omb.gov) and the historical data section, I found the Social Security trust funds with their historical income and expenditures.\u00a0 It showed that $140 billion was spend on Social Security Disability payments in 2011 and $146 billion payments were estimated for 2012.\u00a0 This trust fund is projected to go into deficit by 2016\u2026Even if we estimate that only 33% of the folks on social security disability can still work, that generates $47 billion a year in savings and eliminates the deficit in this trust fund.\u00a0 The Administration is aware of this issue and in its budget for 2013 is requesting an additional $1 billion to examine 650,000 people (see omb.gov, budget tab, social security administration budget).\u00a0 We at United We Stand (unitedwestandllc.com) agree with the administration\u2019s direction but would request another $2.1 billion to examine 2,000,000 recipients each year.\u00a0 Even with these added funds, it will take 4 years to get through all the disabled workers.<\/p>\n
Just how serious is this \u2018vast disability-industrial complex\u2019 so called by correspondent Chana Joffe-Walt and alluded to by Mr. Goldberg in his editorial? It appears quite serious and effective and is composed of many aggressive lawyers and friendly physicians. \u00a0One indication of the seriousness of this is a series of quotes about the social security disability program from Attorney Joseph Matthews with Dorothy Matthews Berman in a book I am reading about Social Security, Medicare, and Government Pensions (NOLO 2012).\u00a0 On page 51, he indicates there are \u00a0over 8,000,000 workers on disability. \u00a0On page 52, he references a book (NOLO\u2019s Guide to Social Security Disability: Getting and Keeping your Benefits) that guides the worker on how to convince the Social Security Administration that they are disabled. \u00a0On page 61, he indicates that \u2018age is also taken into consideration. Social Security realizes that it won\u2019t be committing to as great an outlay of money when it grants disability benefits to people nearing retirement age\u2026For this reason, and because it is more difficult for older workers to find new employment\u2026Social Security tends to approve their disability claims more readily than those of younger workers\u2019.\u00a0 If you factor in the \u2018disability freeze\u2019 into the retirement calculations of these disabled workers, by acting generously to the older workers, the Social Security Administration is increasing its outlays later for retirement benefits for these workers.<\/p>\n
Harry Pukay-Martin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jonah Goldberg had a great editorial April 5, 2013 about the social security disability program.\u00a0 It appeared in the Columbus Dispatch. \u00a0\u00a0If the British experience is any indication, we have 67% of the folks on social security disability that can still work.\u00a0 Goldberg indicated that .65% of theUS workforce in 1960 was on disability.\u00a0 By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unitedwestandllc.com\/uws\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}