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It happens all the time. I head out to the nearest mall to work through my weekly honey-do list. After spending five minutes securing a parking spot, I walk to my destination. As I pass the handicapped parking spaces located a hop and a skip from the entrance — the spaces reserved for people in wheelchairs, or really old people with walkers, or other genuinely handicapped people — I notice a car pull into one. It’s one of those Seinfeld moments, and I turn into George Costanza. Almost. The first thing I do is stop and take a look at...

Hiding The Unemployed: Disability And The Politics Of Stats Wendy McElroyApril 26, 2013 Some statistics cannot be understood without being set within a political framework, because they reflect politics as much as, or more than, they do reality. The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted official unemployment rate for February fell to a four-year national low of 7.7%. While the White House cautiously congratulated itself, Republicans quickly pointed to what is often called the real unemployment rate; it stood at 14.3%.The BLS looks at six categories...

The nation's disability rolls continued to climb sharply, as 76,983 workers enrolled in the Social Security Disability Insurance program in April, according to new data from the Social Security Administration. More than 300,000 have joined the program so far this year. The number of workers on permanent disability is now a record 8,865,586, a net increase of one million in just three years. Today, 6.5 workers are on disability for every 100 who have a job. That's double the ratio from two decades ago.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Social Security's disability program is overwhelmed by so many claims that judges sometimes award benefits they might otherwise deny just to keep up with the flow of cases, according to a lawsuit filed by the judges themselves. The Social Security Administration says the agency's administrative law judges should decide 500 to 700 disability cases a year. The agency calls the standard a productivity goal, but the lawsuit claims it is an illegal quota that requires judges to decide an average of more than two cases per workday. "When the goals are too high, the easy way out...

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. The vast majority of...

The White House said Friday it is proposing a 13.6 percent increase in funding for the handling of veterans benefits, an effort to reduce the Veterans Affairs Department’s massive backlog of disability claims. ~snip~ The number of pending claims filed by veterans seeking compensation stood this month at 885,000, 70 percent of which have been pending for more than 125 days. Veterans can wait a year or more for a decision at particularly overloaded regional offices, among them Baltimore...

Almost as many people signed up with the federal government's permanent worker disability program as got jobs in March, according to two sets of government data, continuing a troubling trend throughout the Obama recovery. Last month, 81,804 workers left the workforce to join the Social Security Disability Insurance program. So far this year, nearly a quarter million workers have joined the program. Over the past four years, 4 million left the workforce to go on disability. Even after accounting for those who dropped out of the program because of death or retirement, the ranks of the disabled have shot up...

(CNSNews.com) - The federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund, which takes in money via a federal payroll tax and pays it out in disability benefits, ran a record $31.2 billion deficit in calendar year 2012, according to the Social Security Administration. That means the trust fund has run a deficit in each of the first four years of the Obama presidency. For fifteen straight years before Obama took office—from 1994 through 2008—the Disability Insurance Trust Fund ran a surplus. In 2007, for example, it ran an $11 billion surplus and in 2008 it ran an $889-million surplus.

(CNSNews.com) - The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record of 8,853,614 in March, up from 8,840,427 in February, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration. That means there are more than 3 times as many Americans taking disability payments as there are people living in the city of Chicago, which according to the Census Bureau has a population of 2,707,120. March was the 194th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January...

The greatest irony here is that those older arthritics fall into another group besides "most likely to file for disability". That group is "the Republican party". Here's how people in different age groups voted in 2012.

To all freepers on social security disability, when checking my direct deposit into bank account. I was reduced by $136.65. Has this happened to anyone else.

The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” — through a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms — to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that’s Britain, where there’s a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of...

A Rhode Island couple has revealed how they were moved to tears when Pope Francis kissed their disabled eight-year-old son in front of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday. Paul and Christina Gondreau of Johnston and their five children, including son Dominic who suffers from cerebral palsy, attended Easter Mass at the Vatican. An usher directed Dominic and his mother to an area designated for handicapped children, said Paul Gondreau, a theology professor at Providence College who is teaching this semester in Rome. When the pope's vehicle arrived, the usher motioned to the driver to stop...

While US Constitution and free market capitalism set the the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts.  Over time American frontiersmen and settlers forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance. Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts...

Videos showed Christopher Inserra, a New York police officer on disability for an arm injury, flailing both arms while performing with his heavy metal band, Cousin Sleaze, according to court documents. He was charged Tuesday with mail fraud. NEW YORK — A New York police officer was charged Tuesday with mail fraud for allegedly claiming disability benefits for two years while at the same time performing and touring with his heavy metal band, Cousin Sleaze, according to court documents. Christopher Inserra, an officer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was the lead singer with the Brooklyn...

When President Clinton signed "welfare reform" into law in 1996, he promised to end welfare as we know it. Now, some new reporting suggests we've created a new kind of welfare -- only most Americans aren't aware of it. The number of people who depend on checks from Social Security's disability programs has soared in recent years, according to NPR's series "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America." The reports, which began over the weekend and continue this week, raise the question: How disabled are the recipients, really? As you might imagine, they have touched a nerve....

The startling rise of disability in America In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the...

March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. That's how the saying goes. And oh, how it rings true for my family. It is Lent, of course, a time for the faithful to pray, sacrifice and fast. And it is in our prayerful reflections and daily acts that we prepare ourselves for Easter and new life. March is also Trisomy Awareness Month. For my family, this has become a time to celebrate the life of our daughter Bella. Bella was born almost five years ago with trisomy 18, a severe genetic condition that I believe makes every...

I Was a Danged Fool! For twenty-two or so years before my retirement I had chronic back pain -- sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. When the pain was enough to take my breath away, I’d swallow a few ibuprofens, acetaminophens, or whatever over-the-counter pain relief I had on hand and carefully hobble off to work. Once or twice I self-prescribed bed rest for a day. But generally, if I could make it to the breakfast table, I could make it to work, figuring that the pain would subside as the day wore on. It NEVER ONCE occurred to me...

Eric Harroun is an Arizona native who rioted with rebels in Cairo and fought in Syria for Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra. **SNIP** Harroun's descent into Islamic fanaticism seems to have begun sometime after his discharge from the military. With seemingly no way to pursue his lifelong dream of being a soldier, he fell in with two Iraqi brothers, Maadh and Hayder Ibrahim, who he met while attending Pima Community College in Tucson, and began to identify himself as a Muslim, according to people who know him.