Anecdotally, I am closely acquainted with several people who receive disability assistance from the government. They are all genuinely unable to perform moderate physical labor at present.
However, without exception, their disability was brought about by poor personal decisions and could be remedied fairly easily. The financial assistance gives them a strong incentive not to try.
> all genuinely unable to perform moderate physical labor
I know of several people who spend all day sitting at home blogging or chatting on email because they're physically disabled. Yet I've employed multiple people as customer support techs who's job description is "sit at home and chat on email".
Our government is unwilling to tell people that they're free to either work or not work, but if they choose not to work, they won't get paid.
It's a collective action problem: no politician wants to be the first one to be "mean" and tell perfectly competent people that they can't live off of the stolen labor of others.
...so we continue to have "disability" for people who are entirely capable of working, albeit not at wages that they'd prefer to earn.
Right, the old "take it or leave it" proposition. But is it actually better for our society to have all of these people living on the street? Becoming homeless? Going to our emergency rooms for medical care? Or, better yet, forcing them to become dependents on the next generation for food, shelter, and (expensive) medical care?
Realistically, those are the alternatives. A large subset of people have insufficient education or qualifications for a desk job. And note that "being old" is itself likely to disqualify you from a lot of jobs.
Remember, this amounts to $13,000/yr, which hardly qualifies as a sinecure, and health insurance. Do you think they're likely to be able to get a job which includes health insurance? Because otherwise "get a job" is a non-starter.
I'm betting when faced with the prospect of living on the street, or worse, starving to death, these people would figure out a way to cope with their current afflictions.
This is ridiculous considering that a large number of homeless people have a disability, physical or mental. To say that this people are just faking it or overreacting because they don't want to work is really messed up, you are essentially saying you really don't believe those people actually live with a disability.
I know I'm repeating here, but have you met the people living on the street? They aren't starving, thanks to charity, but they aren't that employable. A lot of them lack limbs, or have serious mental health problems that are probably exacerbated by living on the street, and would probably be exacerbated by working in a rough job.
I've tried thinking of jobs they could do, but I have had a hard time coming up with anything except recycling - something like sorting through residential trash picking out the recyclables. As it turns out, that industry is employing a lot of homeless people. And, you have to consider that recycling is subsidized by fees on bottles and cans.
I've also worked at a place were we hired a guy with some mental disability to clean up the cafe. He did OK, but not a really good job. If they offered $2 more an hour, they could have hired someone who'd clean AND fix things, easily saving more than the $4000 extra a year he'd cost.
I'm not really sure what kind of jobs you have in mind--- an employer can basically turn you away for any plausibly-non-discriminatory reason. And the kinds of jobs we're talking about here simply don't provide health insurance. Period.
Even if you think "high blood pressure" isn't a disability, the set we're talking about is older and more likely to require expensive medical care.
Are you willing to hire functionally illiterate people to do tech support? Of course not. It's not just a question of willingness to work; the overlap between people who can do intellectual work for low pay and little supervision is much, much smaller than people who can work physical jobs in a highly supervised environment.
At some point capitalism has to reap what it sowed. Deskilling peasant labor into manual-worker labor was an essential component of capitalist industrialization, but it creates a population that gets totally screwed over by capitalist post-industrialization.
This is true, but given that unemployment in the US is still sitting at 7% (or whatever -- pick your favorite metric), we as a society have a strong incentive for them not to try. It's much better for all of us that they be comfortable and (importantly!) consuming in the marketplace than that they be destitute and looking for work.
And even so, the disincentive thing really isn't a macro-scale problem. During the boom years in the late 90's, for example, we came very (some might say perilously, heh) close to full employment. If this policy, which is broadly unchnaged from what it was 15 years ago, was really a drag on the labor economy, it would have been visible then. It really wasn't.
> It's much better for all of us that they be comfortable and (importantly!) consuming in the marketplace than that they be destitute and looking for work.
This seems like a false dilemma: Either they're on disability and consuming, or they're not on disability and destitute, with no middle ground. Grandparent's anecdote is about disability that "could be remedied fairly easily," with the implication that the "remedy" in this case might be "rent is due next week."
Right, but the point of the second paragraph is that (in the aggregate) it's really not a dilemma at all. In conditions of very high employment (with the rising wages and physical mobility that entails) these people tend to go off disability (or not go on it at all) and enter the workforce for the simple reason that there is money available.
My point isn't that it's a perfect system, just that it scales the way you want it to and we should be wary of changing it just to stick it to some lazy good for nothings. Right now, like it or not, disability backfills a lot of what a "welfare" or "guaranteed income" program would be doing, and mucking with it risks severe poverty for its users and economic damage to the rest of us.
> we should be wary of changing it just to stick it to some lazy good for nothings.
I agree with you there, at least insofar as any change I can think of to stick it to them would also probably hurt the people the system was designed to help. I'd rather fund a few deadbeats than a genuinely disabled person go hungry, if given no other choice.
I guess I just fail to see how reducing the number of people on disability could, taken in isolation, result in economic damage to the rest of us.
If you add 4.8% people on well-fare, 2% convicts, some percentage of people that sustain themselves via petty crimes, and large number of government employees that don't do anything actually useful and also employees that are employed by private sector and their employer would like to fire them because they cost more then they are worth, but can't fire them due to various mass agreement, union restrictions and general PR ..... you end up with pretty high number number.
However, without exception, their disability was brought about by poor personal decisions and could be remedied fairly easily. The financial assistance gives them a strong incentive not to try.