As President Trump’s 2018 fiscal year budget proposal receives more scrutiny it is important to emphasis how deep he wants to cut programs for the poor and disabled. We focused on the hundreds of billions of dollars Trump wants cut from Medicaid, which enables millions of poor Americans to access to health care, in a previous post, but now the time is to focus on Social Security disability.
The president is asking for a budget that cuts $72.5 billion from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). It took Trump just four months to break a promise to the American people that he would not touch Social Security.
It could be that Trump, like Mick Mulvaney, the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, doesn’t believe SSDI and SSI are what Americans consider to be “Social Security.” Even though SSDI benefits only go to disabled workers who have paid into Social Security long enough, Mulvaney said he is sure “999 people out of 1,000” think SSDI is not Social Security according to a story in The Atlantic. Apparently Mulvaney believes that most Americans only consider retirement benefits to be the “real” Social Security.
I hate to break it to the misinformed Mulvaney, but approximately 16.7 million Americans receive some form of benefits from SSDI, which is approximately 5.2 percent of the entire population of the country. Somehow Mulvaney believes just 0.1 percent of Americans believe SSDI is part of Social Security. I guess he believes that the other 5.1 percent of Americans who receive help from SSDI don’t believe it is part of Social Security, but that doesn’t make senses. This means Mulvaney intentionally made a remark he knew not to be true or has no idea what the real truth is, either case is frightening.
It is easy to pick on Mulvaney because he seems to not know what he is talking about. When it fits his argument, Mulvaney lumps Social Security’s retirement and disability programs together when he says Social Security “grew tremendously under President Obama.” Rather than what Mulvaney said, it is more important what he did not say. The fact is that the number of people on SSDI increased about half as much as it did under President George W. Bush and enrollment in SSDI actually decreased by 2 percent over the past two years while the number of people collecting Social Security retirement benefits increased almost 6 percent over that same time period. Needless to say, Mulvaney is not credible on anything when it comes to Social Security. It’s disappointing that Trump has a budget director who doesn’t understand the budget.
It is clear the Trump Administration is out to destroy the SSDI and SSI programs and it should make everyone uneasy. There are many critics of the Social Security disability program, but most of these critics are propagating false information about Social Security disability like the number of people receiving benefits is increasing and the program is full of scam artists who are stealing taxpayer dollars. These are both untrue as the number of people who are receiving benefits continues to decrease and fraud is extremely rare in Social Security disability compared to the Defense Department. Keep in mind Trump wants to increase spending on defense, as outlined in his budget proposal.
Social Security disability is an easy target because most people don’t rely on it, but those people should be aware that statistics indicate that about 33 percent of all workers become disabled at one point in their life unable to maintain employment. Many of those who think they will never need Social Security disability actually will in the future. Remember, SSDI is an insurance program. These are workers who paid into Social Security after working years upon years just like everyone else. Many people think it could never happen to them, but there are many people on SSDI right now who thought the same thing.
