Free Republic

President Trump said Friday that he is prepared to act unilaterally to reinstate expanded unemployment benefits and suspend the payroll tax due to the coronavirus, but signaled he wouldn’t do so immediately. Trump told reporters that his administration is working “in good faith” to reach an agreement on the next stimulus package with Democratic leaders, before lambasting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) for seeking funding for states and cities that he said have been mismanaged by Democratic politicians. “If Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage, I will act under my authority...

The number of Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits is plunging, a startling reversal of a decades-old trend that threatened the program’s solvency. It is the latest evidence of a stronger economy pulling people back into the job market or preventing workers from being sidelined in the first place. The drop is so significant that the agency has revised its estimates of how long the program will continue to be financially secure. This month, the government announced that the program would not run out of money until 2032, four years later than its previous estimate last year. Two years ago,...

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...

When financial advisers discuss Social Security benefits, it is usually in the context of counseling clients when to claim retirement benefits and the impact of that decision on the amount of survivor benefits for the remaining spouse. But one of the Social Security program's most valuable features is disability benefits that are paid to workers and their dependent family members when they are too sick or injured to work. Yet many advisers are at a loss when it comes to guiding a client through the disability application labyrinth. That's when it's time to call in the pros. One adviser contacted...

One in three, or 35.2 percent, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government, ranked in the top-ten list of states where disabled beneficiaries were diagnosed with mental problems. In 2013, the latest data from SSA show there were 10,228,364 disabled beneficiaries, up 139,625 from 2012 when there were 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries. Disabled beneficiaries have increased 49.7 percent from a decade ago in 2003 when there were 6,830,714 beneficiaries; and the number is up 14.3...

“Mental disorder” is the leading “diagnostic group” for disabled people receiving federal disability insurance benefits, with 35.5 percent of all disabled beneficiaries having such a disorder, according to the latest Annual Statistical Report on the Social Security Disability Insurance Program. The report provides a statistical profile of the 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries who were receiving federal disability benefits as of December 2012. Those 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries were almost double the 5,044,388 disabled beneficiaries who had been in the program as of December 1995. In Washington, D.C., according to the report, 43.2 percent of disabled beneficiaries as of December 2012 had been...

Throw-away track phones bought at a nearby dollar store. Private investigator hired to trail working mom. Massive document shredding days. Bashing of hard drives. Office Chaos. Wow. Is this the latest fiction novel on a crime themed best seller list? No. These are actual references in US House of Representatives hearings on the massive Social Security Disability Fraud Scandal. Honest and dedicated federal employees, sickened and disgusted over the theft of money and services of US taxpayer dollars filed a whistleblower lawsuit to blow the lid off of a scandal that looks to bankrupt a federal agency founded for the...

The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,962,532 million in April, which exceeds the 10,815,197 people who live in the nation of Greece. … April was the 195th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. …

Social Security Official Presents Plan B: Raid The Retirement Fund Bruce Krasting, My Take On Financial EventsMarch 20, 2013Stephan Goss, the chief actuary for Social Security (SS) provided a detailed report on the status of the SS Disability Fund (DI) to the House of Representitives. The short story is that DI is going bust in a few years. The options to fix this problem were spelled out in the report. The extremes of the required “fix” range from an immediate cut in DI benefits of 16%, or an increase in DI payroll taxes of 20%. Nothing new there. But, there...

In the past four decades, the number of people receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 1.5 million in 1970 to 8.8 million in 2012, the Congressional Budget Office says. On Thursday, Joyce Manchester, a chief analyst with the Congressional budget Office, told a House subcommittee that the number of people seeking DI benefits is expected to continue rising, and she said the Affordable Care Act “is likely to influence application rates” although it’s “difficult to predict” what the impact will be. … Applications for disability insurance could increase under Obamacare,...

A proposed federal rule to cap profit margins for certain health insurance plans and prescription drug benefit programs is now available for review. The latest in a raft of rules required by President Obama’s landmark healthcare law, the proposed rule was drafted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and sent to Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday. The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is moving quickly to issue the proposal, which will hit the Federal Register on Tuesday. That begins a 60-day comment period. CMS will consider all comments before finalizing the rule. The 116-page...

Here’s the dirty secret of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 tax increase of $8.5 billion. Most of it would not go to education, as advertised. Instead, it indirectly would go to plugging a gaping budget hole created by the Obama Administration’s policy of taking people off unemployment rolls and putting them on permanent disability benefits. The Obama policy blew a $11.7 billion budget hole in California’s budget. The Obama Administration’s loosened eligibility requirements for Social Security Disability have swelled the number of those on Medicaid in California. It is Obama’s relaxed requirements for Social Security Disability — put into place...

Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security's disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency. Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can't find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs. The stampede for benefits is adding to a growing backlog of applicants — many wait two years or more before their cases are resolved — and worsening the financial problems of a program that's been running in the red for years. New congressional...