It's Pennies

The thing about the obsession with "disability fraud" - Fuck you Washington Post and This American Life with your smug bullshit - is that even if there are a significant number of moochers scamming the system, the monthly disability check is so low and the requirements to qualify and continue receiving it are so onerous... how dare anyone make an issue of this. People are getting filthy rich stealing money from taxpayers through the Pentagon and elsewhere. If this is your priority as a reporter and an editor, there is something seriously broken in your brain. Hope someone runs hit pieces on your disability "scam" when you need it, assholes.

SSDI is not a welfare program. Just like Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, the more famous half of Social Security, it’s a social insurance program that only goes to people who’ve paid into it over the course of many years. It’s meant to protect against a risk that every employed person faces: the risk that one day their body will fail them and leave them unable to keep their job.

But the stereotype Rand Paul echoed, of the lazy SSDI recipient with occasional backaches, influences policy. President Trump’s 2018 budget proposed $72.5 billion in cuts to SSDI and to Supplemental Security Income, another program for disabled people, over 10 years. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney called the program "very wasteful" and bemoaned the fact that it "grew tremendously under President Obama."

The belief that the poorest and most marginalized people in society Actually Have It Better Than Everybody is destroying us. The souls of the people perpetuating this bullshit are already destroyed, and if I believed in an afterlife I'd at least be content knowing which way they were headed.