SS disability program discourages work

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune

When the White House unveiled its 2018 budget on Monday, plenty of Democrats were quick to characterize it as stingy and cruel. Among the exhibits for the prosecution was the plan for Social Security Disability Insurance, whose projected outlays the administration would cut by 5 percent by 2027.

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney started the argument in March. “It’s the fastest growing program,” he asserted. “It grew tremendously under President Obama. It’s a very wasteful program, and we want to try and fix that.”

The critics pointed out that since 2014, the number of Americans on disability has fallen. That’s true, but not entirely reassuring. The figure didn’t begin to come down until five years after the end of the Great Recession, and the total remains considerably bigger than it was when that downturn began.

Some of the increase came about because of demographic changes. As the oversized baby-boom generation ages, it boosts the number of people suffering from physical and mental afflictions that make it difficult to hold a job.

But these facts are not enough to fully explain the long and sustained expansion of the program. The number of disabled workers on the rolls has doubled over the past two decades, and outlays have doubled as well, after accounting for inflation. Last year, the Social Security trustees projected that the fund is likely to run out of money in 2023.

It would have been reasonable to expect those numbers to decline as medicine has produced better treatments for a variety of debilitating ailments. Fewer jobs require backbreaking labor than in the past. The Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to facilitate the employment of people with various limitations.

But the number of people getting disability benefits has climbed anyway. As economists David Autor of MIT and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland note in a report for the Center for American Progress, the program “is supporting a rising rate of dependency and a declining rate of labor force participation among adults with disabilities.”

That dry analysis doesn’t capture the real-world consequences. “Across large swaths of the country,” the Washington Post reports, “disability has become a force that has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, where as many as one-third of working-age adults live on monthly disability checks.”

It’s no surprise that when the economy tanks, more people apply for and get disability benefits. But the program deters many beneficiaries from going back to work even when jobs become more plentiful.

Mulvaney stresses the need to return those disability recipients who can work to productive employment. The administration wants to try experiments such as requiring applicants to look for jobs before their disability applications are considered, and making more use of vocational services to help prepare them for jobs. Lawmakers ought to welcome new ideas to improve the disability program, which has no shortage of flaws.