Cutting spending is always hard, so conservatives should focus on the least deserving recipients no matter what walk of life they are in.
C onservatives and deficit hawks have long sought out programs to cut in efforts to reduce our gargantuan deficits. Recent reports from the Washington Post show that reforming our dysfunctional and overgenerous disability insurance programs are great places to start.
Saying “disability insurance” conjures up visions of quadriplegics and stroke victims. Those and many other seriously injured people do get government benefits — and rightly so. No compassionate or politically aware person wants to deprive these genuinely needy people of a dime.
The trouble is that our disability programs pay tens of billions of dollars a year to people that no right-minded person would say is unable to work. They aren’t “disabled” in any rational meaning of the word, yet they still get checks each month from you and me via good old Uncle Sam.
The Social Security Disability Insurance program is a case in point. Created in 1956 and signed into law by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, SSDI is funded by part of the 12.4 percent payroll tax workers and their employers pay on wages up to $176,100 per person.
Most of that goes to pay for Social Security retirement benefits, but a lot goes for disability payments. SSDI paid out $157.6 billion to beneficiaries in 2024.
People receiving SSDI for two years also qualify for Medicare even if they are under 65 years old. About 7.7 million people under 65 were on Medicare in 2024, most of them because they were on SSDI. If Medicare spent the average amount on each of them, SSDI beneficiaries cost taxpayers over an additional $100 billion on health care in 2024.
It would surprise most people to learn that many of these people are on SSDI because of their age, not their medical condition. That’s because the program assumes that people are less capable of learning new job skills once they hit 45 or 50 years old.
Indeed, one law firm’s website claims that “a 50-year old disabled steel worker” who can no longer perform those tasks will be found to be disabled if they are still capable of performing “sedentary work” — that is, a job with minimal walking or standing. Most people probably would want to help that person get the training they need for a new job, but not put them on the government dole until they reach their full retirement age.
The Post recently reported that the Trump administration is considering removing these age-related requirements, or dramatically increasing the age at which they would be applied. This is a long overdue reform, especially if accompanied by programs that would provide the affected applicants with the skills training they might need to take the jobs they can perform.
It’s even more important to reform the Veterans’ Administration’s massive disability payments program. This once laudatory way of helping people who became disabled while in their nation’s service has transmogrified into a way to shovel cash to a politically powerful lobby group.
Today’s program provides payments for a host of ailments, including those as minor as hay fever or eczema. Veterans get a set amount per ailment regardless of whether they can or are working, and they can qualify for as many ailments as they can provide documentation for.
Moreover, these amounts are entirely tax free. Former veterans with tinnitus, hay fever, sleep apnea, and other common maladies can receive tens of thousands of dollars each year without paying a dime in income tax on them.
Most people getting these checks are in fact working, most of them full time. At worst, this is outright fraud. At best, applicants are falling prey to temptations set by a system that funnels cash to anyone who once put on a uniform.
This labyrinthian set of programs is massively expensive: $193 billion combined last year alone. The number of recipients and the total cost has exploded since 2001 even as the number of veterans in the population has dramatically declined.
No one begrudges helping our wounded warriors. No one in their right mind should want to send thousands of tax-free dollars a year to someone holding down a full-time job for things that over the counter medicine can easily address.
There are lots of ways to eliminate the wasteful spending. The hardest but most comprehensive plan is to simply stop paying people for ailments that don’t prevent them from working. That alone could cut tens of billions a year from our deficit.
Taxing those payments for people who are working is another way of shifting incentives. If they had to pay tax on their payments, which can total up to nearly $50,000 a year even if they hold full-time jobs, they’d think twice about taking money for nothing.
Cutting spending is always hard, so conservatives should focus on the least deserving recipients no matter what walk of life they are in. Don’t be scared of the word “disability,” conservatives. There’s a lot of fiscal gold to be mined from those mooching off the rest of us in the disability-industrial complex.