Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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That is sort of what the Post reported. It told readers that:
“One of the largest federal programs that provides cash benefits to disabled workers overpaid $11 billion during the past nine years to people who returned to work and made too much money, a new study says.”
The Post article never bothered to tell readers that the program paid out roughly $1.1 trillion in benefits over this period, making the overpayment equal to 1.0 percent of benefits. It also would have been worth noting that the study by the Government Accountability Office found that most of this money is repaid, so that the government ends up losing substantially less than 0.5 percent of its spending on the disability program due to overpayments.