Disability Insurance, Where Social Security is Broken

Ezra Klein:

But Social Security’s disability program is area of obvious dysfunction that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Damian Paletta has a great Wall Street Journal piece this morning that highlights just how out of control the program has gotten by focusing on one judge, David Daugherty:

In the fiscal year that ended in September, the administrative law judge, who sits in the impoverished intersection of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, decided 1,284 cases and awarded benefits in all but four. For the first six months of fiscal 2011, Mr. Daugherty approved payments in every one of his 729 decisions, according to the Social Security Administration. …This breakdown is one reason why Social Security Disability Insurance — one of the federal government’s two disability programs — is under severe financial strain. It paid a record $124 billion in benefits in 2010 and is on track to become the first major entitlement program to go bust. Government officials said last week it is expected to run out of money in 2018

Since welfare reform took place, this tends to be the place where people end up when they are looking to be on the dole.  That is very problematic, since disabled people do need assistance, and being associated with goldbrickers doesn't do them any good.  Apparently, in Tennessee, attorneys advertise about how well they can get you onto disability.  One good thing for the disabled, many of the people who go on disability but aren't disabled are white, so that makes disability less of a target for conservatives, since it is their base, and not black or brown people abusing the system.