A recent response piece from the Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder Dean Baker is calling out The Washington Post for recent articles criticizing the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. In particular, Baker highlights the hypocrisy of the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, for recent stories the paper has published about the negativity related to the SSDI program. You may have heard Bezos name before. Not only did Bezos purchase The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, but he is also the founder of Amazon. Baker says “The paper owned by the man who got incredibly rich by avoiding state and local sales taxes is upset because workers are getting Social Security disability payments that average less than $1,300 a month. Since the [United States] has one of the least generous disability programs of any wealthy country, this might seem like a strange concern.”
Baker backs-up his argument with data from the Organization for Economic Co-cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD is an intergovernmental economic organization with 36-member countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. According to the chart courtesy of the OECD, based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2015, the United States is near the bottom when it comes to public spending on incapacity, or disability. The GDP is a monetary measure of the market value of all the goods and services produced in a period of time. There are a total of 33 countries examined by the OECD and only five, Turkey, South Korea, Chile, Canada and Japan rank lower in spending on disability than the United States. A total of 27 of these countries spend more on disability programs than the United States, but the average monthly disability payment of $1,197, according to Social Security’s fact sheet, is too much for the world’s wealthiest man to stomach.
