Disability

Fundamental changes to laws and attitudes will be needed to address the mental health hardships faced by both LGBT and non-LGBT people, and to reduce the disparities that exist between them.

The financial health of the Disability Insurance Fund has improved, but individuals may be suffering due to an inability to receive the benefits they need to support themselves.

Most Americans would benefit from a more comprehensive and universal system of social protection than currently exists in the United States. But Black men would be among the most well served by the same kind of comprehensive, inclusive social protections

The ADA’s 30th anniversary is set to take place during a period of crisis in the US. The coronavirus pandemic has decimated employment, with the employment-to-population ratio falling by 8.7 percentage points and the unemployment rate skyrocketing.

With the 30th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) happening this weekend as Black Lives Matter protests continue, it’s a good time to look at the intersection between race and disability in the United States.

The Washington Post has been running a multi-part series on the country’s disability programs. The premise, as stated in the most recent installment, is that we are seeing:

“…decades-long surge in the nation’s disability rolls.”

The formula then involves profiling one or more families who depend on disability payments from the government instead of work for their primary source of income. Usually, the profiles show family members to be reluctant to work and to have drug problems and other unhealthy habits.

While this situation undoubtedly describes a substantial number of people in the United States, the idea that the number of people getting disability payments is exploding is a Washington Post invention, not a fact in the real world. The graph below shows disability payments as a share of GDP from 1980 to 2013.

Source: OECD.

While the share of GDP going to disability payments did rise over this 33 year period, the increase was just over 0.3 percentage points, a rise of 30 percent. Furthermore, Social Security disability payments, the largest component of this spending, has fallen by 0.07 percentage points of GDP over the years from 2013 to 2016, leaving an increase of less than 25 percent measured as a share of GDP over 46 years. (The Social Security Trustees project payments as a share of GDP will fall somewhat more this year.)

At a time when an ever larger share of national income is going to the richest one percent, and large segments of the working class population are seeing rising mortality rates, the Washington Post naturally turns to the country’s most pressing problem: the number of people receiving disability payments from the government.

Its second piece on the topic profiled a family with multiple generations receiving disability benefits. It seemed to go out of its way to include every possible negative aspect of their lives in order to give an unfavorable view of the family and leave readers with the impression that the country has a serious problem of families who do nothing but collect disability checks generation after generation.

The piece begins with a horrible story of young children playing with a puppy and then accidentally dropping it to the floor. They originally think the puppy was killed from the drop, but apparently it was only stunned and managed to survive. Then we get the story of the mother telling the kids to grab sodas to bring to a Sunday morning church service.

We then get the poetic description of the rural Missouri countryside where this family lives:

“She saw that gravel road turn into another and another. She saw trailers, dirt-battered and deteriorating. She saw land as flat as it was empty, land that migrant workers traveled hundreds of miles to cultivate, reaping both that year’s watermelon harvest and jobs that few in the community were willing to do.”