Posted on 02/17/2025 7:44:34 AM PST by Starman417
Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hit a nerve…
While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set 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 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, settlers, and entrepreneurs 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 in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The Industrial Revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains, and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.
One sometimes has to marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.
Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow different from Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines, and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber, and the microchip so different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.
Go back a little more than one generation and it seems like Americans were something of another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 79 million people working in the United States supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability… Fast forward 5 decades and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024 the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.
First off, the United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 70% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s, or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023 that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.
But of course, work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks, and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book-length warning labels. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.
But somehow in that much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed: The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined. American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%. That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
“Don’t heal me, I’m on disability.”
SSDI may end up being the biggest of all the scams.
I have mixed feelings about this. Hubs has muscular dystrophy but still farms part time and busts his hump as a laser operator at a local shop. Went back to work after breaking his leg in 5 places falling down out at the barn. He has been told he needs to stay active.
He is considering disability. Maybe.
His cousin worked in the service industry, mostly as a cook. She is very good. She has back issues from being caregiver to her mom who died of cancer, and several falls and is now finally on disability. After a long fight.
I’m glad it’s available for both so it irks me that others seemed to skate thru eligibility when they didn’t try nearly as hard to stay working compared to my family.
The vast majority of Americans at that time were White and Christian , nowadays not so much.
I think you’re right but how deep does it go? What would the money trail look like?
I qualify as disabled. I still drag my butt to work. Doc even asked why, when I am fully qualified as being on the list many times over, I don’t medically retire. I told her I can’t, my mind won’t let me. Tees me off seeing people getting paid to screw off—I have the same “disabilities” they do. I get and I am sympathetic to easier or time adjusted work load, but not to full loafing off and getting a gubmint paycheck.
Caveat: we all pay a forced premium for disability “insurance.” Like unemployment “insurance” ( I have been defrauded by both) it is not exactly welfare. We pay the premiums, albeit involuntarily.
A few years back, just under half of the top 25 finishers in a major 12K running event were on total long term disability.
We probably still would had we not stolen people from Africa to do the jobs in the fields, watch the kids and do the housekeeping for whites.
my friends hubby has been disabled for the last 35 years.
He gets out and about to various businesses they own but does not “work” at any of them.
Blacks only ever made up 13% of the population.
I’ve watched a few episodes of *My 600 lb Life* and it’s appalling the number of grossly obese people are on disability, eating themselves into an early grave on the taxpayer dime. Not to mention the expense of their medical care.
The writer is missing an important dimension to this “disability” surge.
Government complicity.
I was in Scouting for decades, first as a boy then an Assistant Scoutmaster. In the 70s and 80s, nobody was on meds except for asthma or Benadryl. But nowadays, about 1/3 of my Scouts at Summer Camp were on some type of meds, a lot of them for anxiety but a lot were for asthma etc.
The little DoodleBobs and Mrs B were in a homeschooling co-op. While it was a conservative Catholic co-op, we had a few organic-only and crunchy granola types (present company included). In general, there were some hyper kids but, to a much lesser extent than Boy Scouts, they were normal.
Complicity: The food supply in America has been infiltrated…soy, hfcs, dyes, and a chem lab full of poison in your cereal and meat. In addition, not to start a food fight, the vaccine schedule nowadays calls for about 20 injection by the time the infant is 6 months old.
And I’m not gonna get into the Covid shots.
Yes….we are all individuals and it’s not the Govt’s job to protect us from ourselves. Nobody is forcing Mom and Dad to feed the family Soy or FDA-injected burgers. I get it.
That said, after the government cripples family finances with confiscatory rates of income and property and sales taxes, kids are “forced” (yeah…I know…there is a choice…work with me…) to go to public school lest parents/guardians go to jail for truancy, and Leviathan funnels that money to USAID to undercut liberty or or Monsanto et al to poison us, it is hard for this libertarian to not stand athwart when an article like this is written and say STOP.
Paging Mr. Doge. Pick up the white courtesy phone for a message.
A friend spent 40 years doing construction, all his joints are bad, and it’s painful to move.
He finally got approval for disability.
My life quality has increased dramatically since 2020 when I turned the TV off.
True. And whites were always the majority. I was answering a person who only wanted whites in the country.
How many of them were on anti-depressants or ADHD drugs?
Many years ago a pediatrician in a small Upstate NY town posted an article about the overuse of drugs on particularly boys for hyperactivity when what they needed was to just get outside and run and play.
When I see the crap pushed at kids in sugary drinks and highly processed foods like Pop-Tarts and most breakfast cereal, it’s no wonder they are *hyper-active* and *anxious*.
And the parents claim that their diet doesn’t play a role in it. Yet, how would they even know? The kids never get off the colors and flavorings long enough to see if it makes a difference.
Here’s hoping RFK Jr can make a difference.
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