Earlier this week a story broke about U.S. Rep Tom Reed’s effort to prevent the government from transferring money from Social Security’s retirement trust fund to its disability trust fund in another move by the Republican Party to mess with disabled workers in this country.
It has widely been viewed that this transfer would buy Congress some time by sustaining the disability trust fund, which is expected to be unable to meet full disability payments to Americans, who’ve been found disabled, as early as 2016.
Reed’s suggestion in solving the funding problem for the disability trust fund is to eliminate fraud and abuse from the Social Security disability program and that the program should only be for those “catastrophic” disabilities and for those who “can’t find a job anywhere in America because of that disability.”
This all sounds great until you understand what Reed is saying. I wonder if Reed is aware that the occurrence of fraud and abuse within the Social Security disability program is extremely small and even if the government recouped every cent where fraud and abuse was found, it would not come close to solving the disability program’s shortfall.
I wonder if Reed is saying that a construction worker, who is age 60 and has paid into Social Security hi entire life, should apply for a desk job if he had physical disabilities that prevent him from working as Social Security’s rules indicate? I guess Reed is for changing Social Security’s rules to make it more difficult to qualify even though the Social Security disability program is one of the most difficult to qualify for in the world compared to other nations.
Every time a Republican seems to speak about the Social Security disability program it ends up being someone who clearly has no clue what they are talking about and Reed, in this case, is no different.
To learn more about what Reed is proposing click here.
