It seems like state run welfare, reformed during Clinton administration, has just shifted onto Federal disability. Some of the unemployment improvements are really people shifted onto disability, especially in the poor red states.

This seems worrying, and I don't know how it could be sustainable.

Would be interested for someone who knows to break down the social security part of the budget in regards to new disability payments.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive-budget


http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html

Quote :

"While all those monies have different names and different "requirements" they are all exactly the same thing: paying people who are off the grid, whether by choice or circumstance, indefinitely. i.e. Living Wages. However, they can never be called that. They have to pretend to be something else: this is for food, this is because of a medical problem we just made up, this is because you were caught with weed so we'll leave you in here for 6 months until we sentence you to probation."

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Quote :

"But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me."

9/21/2015 10:41:37 PM

I do think its problematic that people are getting lumped into disability, when in reality their problems are more nuanced than what we generally associate with SS disability. That being said I feel for a lot of these people because they really don't have much of a place in our current economy: They are largely older, relatively unskilled, somewhat injured and probably unlikely to do well in a physically demanding job (which is really one of the only places they might be able to find work).

I'll have to go and review the SS projections that came out this year, I know the disability fund was projected to run-out in the relatively near future

9/22/2015 5:20:16 PM

I've got several family members taking advantage of this program. It makes me sick. Both of them, while they have some issues, could hold low-physical impact, low-responsibility jobs.

9/22/2015 9:36:05 PM