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This is government funded disability and not a company provided disability insurance. (I believe those are 2 seperate things but I'm not fully sure)
Assuming there was a better alternative. Sometimes the best option isn't all fun and games.
This is government funded disability and not a company provided disability insurance. (I believe those are 2 seperate things but I'm not fully sure)
I'm assuming this is pretty much what was on This American Life this past weekend.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
Pretty damn good piece by the Planet Money group. Give it a listen.
Whoops...my bad. Yep, they're different animals.
as pointed out in the Fingleton article posted upstream, the demise of Japan and the poor condition of its economy have been greatly overstated. there's way more to economic analysis than bottom line GDP growth.
. That was supposed to be an edit. *Going for more coffee*
And no mention of Japan's public debt. You ok with running +200% debt as a % of GDP?
never considered it, tbh. seems like that would depend in part on what the borrowing is for and how long debt levels remain elevated.
what are the pros and cons and has 200 to 1 debt/GDP demonstrably hurt Japan? has it helped?
did you have a point, TP, or was that rhetorical?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...rogram/274302/Just as the bar for disability fell, the economy turned on the working class. Factories laid off their assembly workers. The service sector picked up the slack. Wages stagnated for anyone without a college diploma. These changes have made disability more attractive for reasons both obvious and subtle. Although program's payments are small -- the average benefit is a bit over $1,000 per month -- they're not much worse than a minimum wage job. Better yet, they're indexed to inflation, meaning they sometimes rise faster than wages, and come with generous government healthcare. For former blue-collar workers who feel they've lost all hope of finding employment, or who don't want to spend their last years leading to retirement standing all day at McDonald's, disability isn't a bad offer.
It's little surprise then that, as MIT's Autor notes, disability applications tend to rise and fall with the unemployment rate (as shown in his chart below), or that most applications come from workers who have recently lost jobs.
If you're a conservative, the reasons to worry about all this are obvious. There are probably a couple million people who could work if absolutely necessary, and are instead choosing to subsist on taxpayer money. The system, from that perspective, is simply being abused.
But the failures here should be obvious to liberals, too. If the job market is so miserably weak that these workers cannot find jobs -- that they are choosing to live in government-guaranteed poverty rather than take a chance on the labor market -- we need to find a better solution than paying them to sit while their skills atrophy. As of now, that's all we seem to be doing. Despite Clinton-era changes to the program that made it possible for participants to ease back into the work force without losing all their benefits, less than one percent of Americans who go on disability ever leave the program.
Moreover, that program, is headed for bankruptcy. As of last year, Social Security's disability trust fund was on pace to run dry by 2016, which would lead to an automatic 21 percent benefit cut affecting all of the program's participants, including the millions who truly can't work because of their impairments.
Like I said, even if we wanted a new welfare program for the struggling poor, this wouldn't be the way to run it.
The point was that while unemployment is low and the quality of life is high, Japan also has what, in the US, would be considered unsustainable public debt. I am not sure that your claim that GDP is not the 'whole enchilada' while using Japan as an example is all that applicable.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...rogram/274302/Just as the bar for disability fell, the economy turned on the working class. Factories laid off their assembly workers. The service sector picked up the slack. Wages stagnated for anyone without a college diploma. These changes have made disability more attractive for reasons both obvious and subtle. Although program's payments are small -- the average benefit is a bit over $1,000 per month -- they're not much worse than a minimum wage job. Better yet, they're indexed to inflation, meaning they sometimes rise faster than wages, and come with generous government healthcare. For former blue-collar workers who feel they've lost all hope of finding employment, or who don't want to spend their last years leading to retirement standing all day at McDonald's, disability isn't a bad offer.
It's little surprise then that, as MIT's Autor notes, disability applications tend to rise and fall with the unemployment rate (as shown in his chart below), or that most applications come from workers who have recently lost jobs.
If you're a conservative, the reasons to worry about all this are obvious. There are probably a couple million people who could work if absolutely necessary, and are instead choosing to subsist on taxpayer money. The system, from that perspective, is simply being abused.
But the failures here should be obvious to liberals, too. If the job market is so miserably weak that these workers cannot find jobs -- that they are choosing to live in government-guaranteed poverty rather than take a chance on the labor market -- we need to find a better solution than paying them to sit while their skills atrophy. As of now, that's all we seem to be doing. Despite Clinton-era changes to the program that made it possible for participants to ease back into the work force without losing all their benefits, less than one percent of Americans who go on disability ever leave the program.
Moreover, that program, is headed for bankruptcy. As of last year, Social Security's disability trust fund was on pace to run dry by 2016, which would lead to an automatic 21 percent benefit cut affecting all of the program's participants, including the millions who truly can't work because of their impairments.
Like I said, even if we wanted a new welfare program for the struggling poor, this wouldn't be the way to run it.
it's applicable regardless of the example.
quan y and quality are not commensurable; aggregate statistics reveal little about the condition or sustainability of the system, still less about the quality of life of the people within it.
absolutely not, straw man
If median income had kept up with GDP growth, it would be $92K (high quality of (creature comfort) life, not $52K, because the ed/un able/UCA/1% have grabbed the majority of income growth from the 99%.
I agree with you WRT quality of life being important, but there are other cultural differences between the US and Japan that drive that number, making the comparison arguable. But specific to unemployment, is Japan able to maintain low unemployment because of high targeted govt spending (~42% of GDP)? I honestly don't know...
it was boutons who originally made the comparison b/w the US and Japan. like you, I see more dissimilarities than similarities.
4 Hours Ago #12
boutons_deux the leftist talking points
Almost 40% of the Federal disability claims are "back pain". WTF?
pain is very subjective, until you're the patient.
WH...
You can collect SS and still work.
you can collect DIB (provided you have the necessary work credits), not SSI (supplemental security income)-and still work as long as the work is primarily sedentary in nature and the income from that job does not meet the defining criteria for SGA (substantial gainful activity)
As I understand it, it's somewhere around the $800/mo mark for most.
SSI caps off at 694.00 per month and you can get medicaid. DIB is based on work credits (they only go back 10 years, you get 1 per X amount made every quarter) and it comes with medicare. the amt on DIB usually is between 1000 and 1500 per month but it can sometimes be higher. you also get a back pay amt, if approved. usually 8 out of 10 claims are denied.
I was talking about the amount you could earn but I was going on heresay primarily. Don't know much bout this, and I hope I don't have to learn it.
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