The Rising Tide of "Disability": It Shouldn't Be That Big of a Mystery

The fallout of the 2008 financial crisis has been largely focused on its effect on long-range unemployment rates.  While this is perfectly understandable and represents a much bigger long-term problem for this country than does the deficit, there's a related issue that gets far less attention, and that's the dramatic escalation of Americans who have qualified for and are receiving SSI disability payments.  When confusing jobs numbers get released every month, frequently showing a relatively small number of new jobs yet a decline in the national unemployment rate based on "people dropping out of the labor force", unemployed workers shifting to disability represent a large share of those decreed to have "dropped out of the labor force".  And even as jobs numbers have modestly increased over the past couple of years, the rate of people going on SSI has increased faster.  And while commentators are starting to take notice, few seem to have the vaguest hint of why this trend was predictable and inevitable, and why it may in fact get much, much worse.

Just this past week, Harvard economics professor and Bloomberg News columnist Edward Glaeser wrote a column snarkily and cluelessly entitled "2013 Is The Year To Go To Work, Not On Disability", and proceeds to tell us all the ugly statistics about SSI's unaffordable escalation with effectively no context on the cause of the problem.  And on Friday evening's edition of "Inside Washington" on PBS, panelist Evan Thomas talked about how white males have effectively "checked out of life", going on disability, not showing up to vote, and spending their days hunting and fishing.  It's almost too much of a cliche to even bother chastising a Harvard professor and a panelist on a talking heads show called "Inside Washington" about their failure to understand this issue, as simple as it is, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

The problem, Messrs. Glaeser and Thomas, is that males over 50--particularly blue-collar males over 50--who lost their jobs during the financial crisis are never going to be hired to work again.  Challenging as it would be for dislocated workers in that age demographic to be hired in any context, it's infinitely more challenging for them to be hired in America where the employer is on the hook for higher health care premiums for these older workers.  A "lucky" few may get a part-time gig making pizzas at the corner gas station for a fraction of what they earned at their old jobs, but they will still be without health insurance until the day they are eligible for Medicare.  With that in mind, finding a backdoor way to get on SSI is less about trying to avoid working for a living than it is continuing to exist in a nation that is no longer interested in the services you are able to provide.

During the health care debate, there was talk about lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55, and the Americans described above are exactly the people such a policy would help.  If an employer didn't have to take on the health care premium of an older worker, they'd be much more attractive to hire.  But Joe Lieberman led the way in killing that proposal, and so the plight of older working-age Americans continues with no solution in sight other than continued hand-wringing about more and more people going on disability.

Whenever the media reports on this issue, they talk about how loose the guidelines are for qualifying for a disability, ultimately allowing just about anybody to file a successful claim and jump on the SSI bandwagon.  Ultimately, I'm wondering if this isn't by design....that the government is letting most applicants on with a wink and a nod, simply because there is no other alternative for these people, and the economic fallout of more home foreclosures and higher emergency room costs is ultimately deemed costlier than simply sending them a disability check long enough for them to hold on until Medicare.

Meanwhile, in the alternative universe occupied by Washington politicians and the out-of-touch commentariat, all of the talk is about how we need to raise the eligibility age of Medicare still higher, meaning that a nation of 57-year-olds who have no chance of ever working again due to the cost of their insurance will be joined in the unemployment line with 67-year-olds fruitlessly attempting to find a job with health insurance.  The detachment between policymakers and the media with the plight of working-class America has always been pretty striking, but their failure to comprehend why disability claims are on the rise really showcases just how extreme the detachment has become.

The Latest Dance on Gun Policy

It was bound to happen.  For most of the last decade, the public became largely detached from the consequences of a lawless gun policy and the resurgence of the once-extinct assault weapons into the firearms market, but I always knew there would be a game-changing event that would bring gun control back into the public conversation.  And so it did with last week's horrific school shooting of 20 elementary kids and 6 adults at a school in Connecticut.  At this brief moment in time, there is a break in the National Rifle Association's successful propaganda stranglehold that has prevented sensible gun laws from materializing (or in many cases, sensible existing gun laws from being repealed).  Politicians from both sides of the aisle who  have been petrified of the NRA are now reconsidering their unyielding fealty to the organization.

This is a tough issue for me as both sides are tugging me their direction in certain ways.  I tend to be libertarian on these sorts of things and bristle at the idea of law-abiding citizens having freedoms taken away.   And I also buy into one of the gun lobby's long-standing talking points...the idea that people who are seeking guns for pernicious reasons will find a way to get them regardless of laws intended to prevent certain guns from falling into the wrong hands.

However, that is about the only argument from the NRA that I find compelling.  Beyond that, "Second Amendment absolutists" drive me nuts with their cynical and often mindless arguments conjured up based on their fetish for shiny objects that go "bang".  They allow this gun fetish to cloud their better judgment and it seems as though their IQ drops 50 points whenever the topic arises and they preach on and on with all the usual stupidity.....that guns are "inanimate objects" that don't deserve to be blamed for those who do evil things with them....that killers who want you dead will go on murder sprees with rocks or piano wires if they don't have access to guns....that if everyone was packing a Glock 9 we'd be safer since the would-be killers wouldn't dare to assault us....and of course, pointing to the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to own a black powder musket to use when serving the National Guard, is really a license to own an unlimited arsenal of weapons with absolutely zero legal limitations.

In case you can't tell by my tone, the stupidity and self-serving cynicism of gun rights' defenders in the modern era has managed to align me against them, at least superficially, even though I'm emotionally closer to their side of the issue.  And the case of Adam Lanza is a good example of why some restrictions couldn't hurt, especially as it applies to assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.  As I said above, most people who want access to guns are likely to get them, but in Adam Lanza's case, they were right at his fingertips because of his mother's gun fetish.  If mom hadn't introduced him to these diabolical assault weapons and then left them accessible to him within the home, it's very likely 27 people would be alive today.  While banning assault weapons wouldn't put an end to ALL mass shootings, it probably would have stopped this one....and there's a decent chance it would stop the next one.  Given that these assault weapons and high-capacity magazines serve no practical purpose other than stoking the fetishes of the most immature gun owners around, it's a pretty easy call to side with the preservation of human life, both in principle and in practice.

With all that said, the Democratic Party will lose this fight at the ballot box.  The NRA easily won the public relations war, and even though Democrats have been silent on gun control since the end of the Clinton years, gun owners still see the Democratic Party as the enemy.  The conventional wisdom among liberals today who are pushing for Democrats to push for new gun laws is that the gunslinging rural rednecks who were part of their coalition during the Clinton years have all become Republicans, and Democrats no longer need them to win elections...and thus should no longer fear the wrath of the NRA.  There's some truth to this, as there are very few places left in America populated by gun enthusiasts where the Democratic Party still wins elections.  However, the limitations on this theory are evident when recognizing that John Boehner remains the Speaker of the House (with a decisive 234-201 advantage) even though the Republican Party got more than a million fewer votes in House races than did Democrats.  In other words, the nature of the House of Representatives requires Democrats to get votes outside of cities and suburbs if they have any hope of getting a majority. 

I grew up in a gun-loving rural area and judging from my old friends back home and their activity on Facebook since the Newtown shootings, there is zero tolerance for any legal measures against guns.  With the help of cynical NRA framing, it seems as though gun enthusiasts are incapable of differentiating between a law reducing the magazine capacity of AK-47s and a platoon of ATF agents kicking in their door and taking away their Winchester hunting rifle.  As I said, the IQs of otherwise intelligent people fall 50 points when the subject turns to guns.  And I venture to say many of these people are receptive to many of the Democratic Party's arguments on a plethora of other issues, but their gun fetish renders every other issue inconsequential once they set foot into the voting booth.

So ultimately, this becomes a moral issue for Democrats similar to civil rights two generations ago.  Do Democrats feel so strongly about the connection between assault weapons and the loss of human life that they risk alienating millions of voters by imposing new gun restrictions?  It's quite a dilemma, and I'm sure if I had a personal connection to someone senselessly killed by guns I would be more steadfast in my support of new gun laws, but I must confess that with everything at stake, I don't want to alienate any voters if it means any additional empowerment for a Republican Party that grows more unhinged every day.   For better or for worse, I'd much rather take my chances on the limited likelihood of getting gunned down in a mass shooting by a lunatic who stole his mother's assault rifle than a die a more certain death at the hands of  the metaphorical policy gun that the Republican Party is pointing at my head.

The Latest Fiscal Cliff Folly

Here we sit on December 11, in exactly the place any rational person would have expected we'd be six weeks ago....less than three weeks away from the supposed horror of (gasp!) returning to the Clinton tax rates.  The consensus opinion of the left, right, and center seems to be that if we are forced to endure the tax rates of those dark days of 1999 at the onset of 2013, we'll be instantly plunged into a recessionary abyss the likes of which humanity has never before seen.  In other words, the Grover Norquist messaging on taxes and their relationship with the economy has not only stuck but expanded to the point that "tax increases=recession" is now the accepted dogma of even leftist economists and policy analysts.

The reality is that the relationship between taxes and the state of the economy is much more complicated and in this situation the doomsayers may be right that going off the fiscal cliff will equate to economic problems.   At points in the past, when American incomes were ascendant, tax increases were more easily absorbed and had limited effect on the supply and demand curve.  Our biggest problem today is that the business community has spent the last three decades hoarding economic resources while allowing wages and benefits to plunge to historically low depths with each passing year, so it makes sense that the sudden imposition of higher income taxes on wage-earners would depress consumer demand even more.  Whether that would be enough to trigger another recession is not clear, but it certainly wouldn't help.

The problem is that higher taxes on the wealthy simply won't be enough to pay for the greater role that government will have in a nation full of seniors and low-income workers.  Even the best-case scenario restoration of a 39.6% top tax rate for income over $250,000 per year is backsliding towards some possible "compromise" of a 37% top tax rate for income over $1 million a year.  The rise in revenue such a shift would produce is hardly worth the nation's time yet I fear that's what the final legislation will look like.  Instead of the threshold increasing from $250,000, it should be going the other direction, as we'd really hit the revenue sweet spot imposing higher tax rates on income over $100,000 or $150,000.

My money is on us temporarily going over the fiscal cliff.  There will be no deal that Obama and Boehner can hatch out that will be able to get the necessary votes to pass the House before December 31.  Tea Party knuckle draggers will oppose any tax increase of any kind while Democrats will wisely balk at any compromise to raise the Medicare eligibility age, the most idiotic concession that Obama consistently puts on the table and which would effectively kill his Presidency by turning his base ferociously against him.   Whatever alleged breakthroughs that appear to be approaching in the next 20 days should probably be ignored as the odds-on outcome is likely to be going off the cliff, followed by legislation to lower the January 1 tax increases on most Americans as early as January 2, thus allowing Republicans to not have to vote for a tax increase prior to January 1.

At least that's the most obvious play, but I can honestly see an even more cynical alternative.....where Republicans in the House refuse to pass any tax-cutting legislation at all and tempting a recession, telling Democrats that if they like the Clinton-era tax rates so much they can live with them.  Obviously this would be terrible PR for the Republicans in early 2013.  The public indicates they will hold Republicans responsible for going off the fiscal cliff anyway, so Republicans would really be in the doghouse if they went off the fiscal cliff and continued to refuse to deal afterwards.  But it would be temporary.  Obama's numbers would take a hit too based on a "failure of leadership" and ultimately he would own whatever economic fallout followed.  Republicans would count on voters' notoriously short memories and low turnout among the Democratic base for the next midterm election to inflate their House margins and take back the Senate in 2014.  And it would most likely work just as smoothly as it did for the GOP in 2010 when they pulled the same thing and were rewarded with their largest House majority in more than 60 years.

There's also a third possibility that Republicans will winkingly accept a deal to raise taxes before the fiscal cliff but then hold the nation hostage once again a month or so later in regards to raising the debt limit.  While Obama insists "we're not playing that game again", he has unconditionally ruled out raising the debt limit himself through the invocation of the 14th amendment, which means HE WILL be playing that game again.  The politics of that manufactured crisis, should it come to pass, will be the same as the politics if Republicans went off the fiscal cliff....the GOP would be radioactive for a few months in 2013 but would come back to win big in November 2014 since they'd turn the election into a referendum against Obama who's not on the ballot.

Basically the conventional wisdom on the politics of this is right only in the short-term.  While Republicans have few options to avoid a public policy shift not to their liking in the weeks ahead--unless they are able to con Obama into making unnecessary concessions as he has in the past, which is still entirely possible--the Republicans have the advantage by playing the long game.  So long as the party sees destroying their political opposition as their highest priority and is willing to impose ruin on their country as a means to achieve that end, they will ultimately always have the leverage.  For all the wishful thinking about the Republican Party being humbled into sanity based on their election loss last month, the party is aware that no matter what, they are likely less than two years away from their next election victory, meaning the motivation to keep Washington ungovernable will probably linger.  It's tough to say what will break this new normal in American politics where one lunatic party repeatedly plays the role of domestic terrorist, threatening to destroy the American economy unless they get their way on policy issues, but I dare say whatever breaks it will not be occurring in the next two years.