Wow, truly amazing. The politics & economics of special handouts is powerful indeed.

Btw, have you consider posting this issue on e-thePeople?

You sound like you are saying that unless people die at a sufficient rate, they can't really be disabled.

maybe it isn't such a bad thing that disabled people don't have to rely on crappy private plans (think about people in your life with disabling chronic health problems). or demeaning implications of unemployment and medicaid.

what is the net change, anyway? sounds like since 1984, this has operated as a way for presidents to claim they've lowered unemployment. if it gets disabled persons better care (or at least care, which they wouldn't really under unemployment), maybe increases consumer confidence, so what?

You sound like you're trying to read the worst into my posts.

I just think it's worth exploring because it gives us a clearer picture of the impact of our policies.

Your comment makes it seem as if you think being a good consumer (spend, spend, spend) is the extent of our duties as citizens. What about being informed so that when we vote for various policies and politicians, we're better able to judge their effectiveness?

If decreases in welfare rolls drive people to disability checks, we should think twice about how effective welfare reform has been. If true unemployment numbers are distorted, we should look at our economic policies in a new light.

Of course disability claims will rise when it is made easier to obtain payments. When more people think they can get something, more people will ask for it. Presumably the standards were relaxed because a sufficient number of people in government thought more people should be getting benefits.

Use of these "data" (on the reliability of which I comment only briefly, below) to critique the relaxed standards is a preach-to-choir argument that, when recited to the right, elicits outrage — if you naturally view disability payouts as handouts and suspect claimants as "working The System," you'll take a cynical view of these numbers. If you don't, you might well view this as progress. Why shouldn't non-lethal work injuries be compensable through Social Security?

(A side point: It seems there is a bit of fact manipulation in a sentence that says, "since date X, when Y occurred, occurrences of Z have doubled," suggesting that Y is therefore the cause, or at least a cause, of Z. The writer handpicked date X as the starting point for his analysis. What were the trends before date X?)

And it might well be that a lot of other drivers besides opportunism could explain the proliferation of "back pain" claims and the reduction of mortality rates among recipients. One that leaps to mind is the trending away from hardcore manufacturing jobs to sedentary computing positions over the past few decades. The nature of work-related disability evolves with the nature of work. Occupational health and safety regulations increasingly protect the worker; technology abstracts the worker from the more lethal jobsite dangers; business take front-line manufacturing plants to Mexico, and today's high school graduate spends his workday at a telemarketing center instead of the local steel mill.

Demographics might also play a role. The Baby Boomer generation got a lot older and creakier in the late 1980s and 1990s. They're not technically "elderly," but they're certainly more susceptible to disability when they hit middle age. There simply might be more of the type of people who are bound to get hurt. There are also more women in the workplace, raising the overall number of people in the workplace. People working low-income jobs are less active than they were twenty years ago: their jobs require less activity, their down-time is oriented around Blockbuster Video, they eat fattier foods in greater amounts. The large french fries at McDonald's is probably 3 times the size it was in (let's just randomly pick a year) 1984. I worked as a paralegal for a lawfirm defending repetitive stress injury claims brought against computer companies. The prototypical plaintiff was an obese, borderline diabetic woman working an eight-hour data-entry shift with minimal breaks.

And trends in medicine (and, derivatively, in law) certainly have helped to amplify the scope of the term "disability" as much as relaxing government standards have. Right or wrong, doctors are, to my mind, the vanguard in a movement that clinicalizes people's troubles. The medical profession is showing an incerasing commitment to diagnosing and medically treating depression, ADD, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction. The result is changing norms: much of what prior generations had regarded as human faults is now viewed, rightly or wrongly, as illness (you know what I'm talking about, Rush? Because you didn't until a month ago . . .), much of it compensable. You don't have to lose your arm in a thresher to be disabled anymore. At the margin, some of these diagnoses are loosey-goosey, but, remember, we're coming from a system a century ago in which a lost finger was a suck-it-up-and-get-back-to-work problem. Again, I see progress, on the whole.

There are of course people who work The System. There always will be. And the right will always raise the specter of a world where government programs cultivate a "soft" American worker. But there's a flipside to this: maybe the American worker is finally awakening to his rights, dignities, and deserts. Maybe that makes him less competitive with foreign counterparts whose conditions are more desperate. Maybe we're losing that "good old work ethic that made this country great"; maybe we've peaked as a society and are on our way into self-indulgent decline, a la Imperial Rome.

But I think that the final measure of a society's strength is not necessarily its ability to cajole its least empowered people to "work through pain." I think the post on Marginal Revolution isn't so much fascinating as it is overly simplistic and dogmatc — a great start for an argument, but not even close to the last word on the subject.