Percent of Americans Receiving Disability Over Time

My uncle is a disability fraudster. Has barely worked a day in his life. Leeched off of my grandmother until he was nearly 60 and she was on death's door.

I often hear liberals argue that red state residents are voting against their own interests when they vote against social welfare, because red state residents are disproportionately dependent on such welfare. But I think it's actually because of this that a lot of rural conservatives don't like these programs. They might be shooting themselves in the foot, but they also probably have a cousin or brother or uncle or neighbor that they despise and who is getting food stamps or Medicaid or disability and they're thinking "that no good lazy cousin of mine needs to get off his butt and work for a change, I have to work and so should he."

Conservatives also tend to have less empathy than liberals, are less tolerant and register more disgust and similar feelings. But... there is no doubt abuse of the system.

Anecdotally, I have done a fair amount of service work in the rural parts of Appalachia and the southeast. I've come across people who are on disability that are definitely getting fraudulently. I've asked some allies down there what the deal is, and they say that a lot of these people have been rendered irrelevant to the workforce by technology and outsourcing. They still have their pride, so they don't want to go on welfare, and claiming a disability offers a socially acceptable reason for not working. There's a big psychological difference between "I can't get a job" and "I am unable to work." I have no idea how this phenomenon tracks on a larger scale, but it's the explanation I was given by someone credible, and it makes more sense than the explanation that people on the Gulf Coast are just disproportionately disabled.

Agreed. Like Scott Walker in Florida going out of his way to try and kick people off of social welfare programs for failing drug tests. The drug tests he ordered cost more than they were saving by eliminating this aid, and without any benefit to anyone.

I guess, it depends on the scale of the problem. There are certainly nuances in how to go about asigning benefits, i.e. it is a huge difference whether the state expects the citizen to prove it's case beyond doubt, or whether it grants more leniantly and investigates, if a fraud is suspected.

When it comes to public trust, I might suspect that this is more reliant on how the media frames it - either as a shocking, nation breaking injustice, or a natural occurence of human society, which can be adressed quite easily. However, I believe the decision for this framing may lay more with specific political viewpoints, than with naturalistic analysis.

I thinkt, the idea, that social assistance discourages people from working is not really significant. Here is an interesting article about that issue.

Of course there is a problem in people, who would lose money, if they were employed, but I don't see, how your proposition actually adresses the problem. Investing in disabled people means investing in their autonomy and mobility. Cutting those benefits will in many cases cut their possibilities to work a job in the first place. Being disabled is expensive. Disabled people are getting hired less, even for jobs they might not have a disadvantage in.

There also is a strong connection between poverty and disability in the first place. On the matter of improving the employment rate, it seems more promising to me, to actually invest in infrastructure and jobs specificaly for disabled people.

Without being an expert, and the US system being very messy, I tried to look into it a little bit, because I'm not convinced, that fraud can be such a huge factor. While aging and population growth can't entirely account for it, it seems, that the federal government expanded several laws and programs, esp. under Clinton. Maybe the accesibility of benefits has widened, esp. into red states, or the definitions of disability and services available have broadened.

There's a great expose at https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ explaining the shift. Has to do with a "disability-industrial complex" of doctors and lawyers directing people who ​have trouble working on their feet, and lack the skills and credentials for desk jobs, to disability. States have an incentive to offload their welfare recipients onto the federal payroll. The feds don't do much to prevent this from happening, so states hire private companies to comb the welfare rolls.

Additionally, a 7x increase in children on welfare, due to a loophole in the disability law. It is enticing for poor folks to get their child on disability to bring in an additional $700/month.