Posted on 07/25/2015 4:54:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The annual check-up for Social Security is in, and one program looks more dire than the rest.
If Congress doesn’t act, people receiving Social Security disability benefits could see a nearly 20 percent cut to payments at the end of next year, according to the latest version of the Social Security trustees report released Wednesday.
The disability trust fund will be depleted by the fourth quarter of 2016, leaving the administration with enough income to pay 81 percent of benefits, according to the report, which is updated annually.
The health of the Social Security program didn’t change by much, and the cut to disability benefits has been expected for years. But now that Congress has still not come up with a compromise for boosting the funding, the shortfall is more imminent. As explained in the report’s summary:
"Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund now faces an urgent threat of reserve depletion, requiring prompt corrective action by lawmakers if sudden reductions or interruptions in benefit payments are to be avoided."
The cuts would most immediately affect the 10.9 million people receiving disability benefits as of 2014, but other beneficiaries could see benefit cuts down the line. If Congress doesn’t act to reform the program, the trust fund used for retirement benefits would be depleted by 2035, a year later than previously expected.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Scare tactic.
Congress will fund it. After all, it is just play money. Going into an election, Congress cannot afford not to fund it.
We heard these scares for decades about Social Security, Disability, Medicare. It is a political football that keeps getting kicked around.
Tinkering totalitarians…
Legal Plunder Has Many Names
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, BENEFITS, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.
Now, since under this definition socialism is a body of doctrine, what attack can be made against it other than a war of doctrine? If you find this socialistic doctrine to be false, absurd, and evil, then refute it. And the more false, the more absurd, and the more evil it is, the easier it will be to refute. Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.
How to Identify Legal Plunder
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
The Results of Legal Plunder
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
/Bastiat
THROW them in prison. CONFISCATE their assets. BANKRUPTING the republic.
DISMANTLE BIG GOVERNMENT. Start with legislators pay (1/10th), perks (0). Make them all part time jobs.
DEFUND/DISMANTLE their agencies.
THEY DID BUILD this...
The freeloaders are those who fake disability to get approved for lifetime of checks beginning as early as age 21. I personally know 1 such person. He plays golf 5 days a week, and walks pushing his cart for 18 holes. How is this dude not capable of doing some job somewhere?
I’ll bet your golfing friend has a placard for handicapped parking too. I see that every day, a young healthy person using grand moms handicapped plackard. It makes me furious, it doesn’t cost anyone any money but I just hate cheats.
I hope your estimate is high for the amount of fraud. Unfortunately I am certain that 20% is the floor for the amount of fraud.
I believe that a big reduction would happen if you told everyone that filed for disability due to mental incapacity (eg bi-polar, depression etc.) that due to their documented lack of mental ability they are no longer qualified to vote.
All those drug addicts and alcoholics who use SSDI to fund their habits.
That’s interesting, because I had two independent SSDI recipients tell me that was their agreement. I thought it was a pretty steep price.
> A cut probably wouldn’t be necessary if they kicked out all the freeloaders who have joined in the last seven years.
We’ve added 10’s of millions of non-taxpaying welfare recipients from Mexico (and Central America) in the last year alone. Our government paid them to come to the U.S. and transported them just shy of the border and told them to walk across the rest of the way. And our tax dollars paid for it all. Now many of them claim they don’t work so they can get the max benefits while beng paid under the table. And you wonder why they’re going to reduce benefits.
Before one cent is cut from American citizens, they better cut out the waste being pissed away on illegal immigrants and money sent to foreign countries that hate America.
If they are paying that to lawyers, it sounds like the lawyers may be scamming them.
Recently while waiting for my MD to assess my gout treatment, I pulled out my laptop and continued development of a planned presentation.
Sitting next to me was a guy in his early 20s who said, "Why are you working?" [Looking at my crutches...] "You look disabled to me. I'm on Disability and don't have to hit a lick..."
About that time, the nurse brought the 5-6 year old boy he was waiting for back to the waiting room. "Mr Disability" swung the kid onto his shoulders and boogied off down the hall!
If I'd known where to report the punk, I would have...
Freeloaders as in people who malinger to keep disability payments once they are no longer disabled, or who were never actually disabled, but were classified as such by an overly generous interpretation of the guidelines by a physician or psychologist.
Yet no cuts to welfare and aid to illegal aliens. Hmm.. so glad we have a government who cares about it’s citizens...
They purposely helped folks defraud the system by adding more SSI Disability folks to the "gimmee" line than ever before - it helped them cook the unemployment numbers.
Our hard earned SSI benefits paid over a life time have been given out to everyone who has not earned it so now we may have to cut it down for those who contributed to it and earned it. Politicians are scum!
Not every disability is obvious. I became disabled this month. I can walk a few steps without a walker. But not much more.
I remember as a child watching Red Skelton as “Freddy the Freeloader”. Imagine the scorn that role would bring today with 66+ millions of Americans on the side of “justice and fairness to the poor and dispossessed.” Skelton would have to change the name of the character or probably drop him entirely. No one would watch his program.
Yes, but with the full consent of the American people, or at least the 66+ million “in charge”.
If you can genuinely walk only a few steps without a walker, that is obvious.
It is people who can swing a five year old kid onto their shoulders and saunter away that should be examined.
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