Posted on 01/22/2018 7:29:53 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you want a sign of a growing economy, look at the disability rolls. They've been shrinking rapidly of late, as fewer apply for benefits and more disabled return to work. This is very good news.
In the aftermath of the last recession, the number of workers who went on the Social Security Disability Insurance program skyrocketed by more than 1 million.
It's clear from the data that this was being driven largely by the lack of good job prospects. Monthly applications for SSDI leapt from an average 182,000 a month in 2007 to 245,000 a month in 2010. Even years after the recession had ended, applications remained well above 200,000 a month as the painfully slow recovery dragged on.
With jobs scarce and enrollment requirements for SSDI fairly lax, it's not surprising that many took this route.
While these trends started to slowly turn around in 2015, they accelerated in 2017.
In fact, the number of SSDI applications in 2017 was down 6% from the year before — the biggest one-year decline since 1997, government data show. At the same time, the number of people leaving the program was higher in 2017 than it's been in more than a decade.
As a result, the number of workers collecting federal disability benefits dropped 1.3% last year, which is the biggest annual decline since 1983.
Some of the enrollment decline is due to the fact that baby boomers who had been on SSDI are aging into retirement, and are shifted over to the regular Social Security program. But the sharp drop in applications is a clear sign of a healthier labor market.
What's more, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a marked uptrend in the number of workers re-entering the workforce after claiming a disability.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
I’d bet that any kind of money spent on compliance checking would pay for itself many times over.
Trump is making the lame walk and the blind see. :-)
Making the blue happy
People do what they have to do to survive.
Enforcing compliance is a lot easier and humane when there are jobs out there to be had.
We should have raised import tariffs to cover unemployment and the increase in disability. If we’re not going to employ our own, we should at least tax the imports.
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