Social Security Disability Benefits are the Benghazi/FastnFurious/Gruber of "Entitlements." Bashing recipients is even the cool, hip thing to do, as proven by NPR-Hipster-God-Horn-rimmed-Raconteur-Muse Ira Glass last year when his This American Life offshoot Planet Money ran a story "exposing" those dastardly children daring to receive benefits under Supplemental Social Security (SSI/SSDI). The NPR story was raw meat for Rush et al's attack cohort, adding an "even-the-liberal NPR" dollop to the usual hate stew. Responding to Media Matters, Glass "stood by" the story, although certain sentences were altered for "clarity."
Many groups and respected economists like Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy research (CEPR) also effectively debunked the story, along with disability experts like Harold Pollack in a piece called Misleading Trends with Benefits. (What a great title!)
This week it was the AP's turn to fuel the flames, running the headline, $2B in disability claims approved by mistake. (We learn only in the text that the the $2B is over seven years.)
Once again Dean Baker is on the case, translating that headline into AP Reports that 99.8 Percent of Social Security Disability Payments Were Proper. Baker points out that:
The piece neglected to mention that the program paid out close to $900 billion in benefits over that period. This means that improper payments identified in the inspector general's report were less than 0.3 percent of the total payments in the program.
This is a particular
bete noire of Baker's -- news articles that cite raw numbers rather than percentages, and make it appear to the average reader that an issue is a much greater matter than it really is. He even has a nifty
CEPR Budget Calculator that takes meaningless raw numbers and adds more revealing percentages, e.g., "For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, Mr. Obama requested nearly $3 billion (0.08 percent of the budget) for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs."
Baker makes a couple of other good points: There are no statistics on how many deserving applicants for disability are turned down by the judges that administer the program. Is it more or less than the .2-3% mistakenly paid. We also have no idea how the mistake/fraud rate for government disability payments compares with comparable waste and fraud at private corporations because they either don't perform or don't release studies comparable to government's studies like the one cited by the AP.
So when your wingnut brother-in-law sends you the AP link, or the NRO link linking to the AP link, send back the Dean Baker link. Of course, you're unlikely to reach the WBIL, so also try posting it on social media that includes non-right wingers who may be swayed by the misleading numbers.
This issue gets at one fundamental difference between left and right -- Paraphrasing Justice Brandeis, "Better .2% undeserving people get disability benefits than 99.8% go without them."