The jobless recovery may equal misery for millions of Americans, but it’s created a boom in Social Security disability claims, many of them no doubt sheer gold-bricking via “personality disorders” and other imaginary illnesses.
Nearly 18 million people — one in 20 Americans — are collecting some $170 billion a year in disability payments, a record high, and the government estimates that fraud and other improper payments account for $25 billion of disability spending over a recent four-year period.
Like the “barefoot beggar,” who only needs to take his shoes off to get free stuff, Dependency Nation has learned how easy it is to take the government for a ride. In many cases, it’s simply a matter of correctly — if fraudulently — filling out the right forms and sending them in
Continuing…
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office catalogued examples of waste, fraud and abuse in just about every federal do-gooder program, including school lunches ($1.4 billion), children’s health insurance ($800 million, or roughly 15 percent of the total), the Earned Income Tax Credit ($12 billion), plus housing subsidies, child-care, unemployment insurance . . . You name it, and some sizable chunk of it is a scam.
In all, the cost to the taxpayers is estimated at some $100 billion a year.And things are only likely to get worse.
Goverment waste is staggaring. What kind of governing culture allows this to take place? It’s not a Democrat or Republican problem, although I know which party I’d like to fix it. The flip side of the question is of interest as well. What type of citizenship culture allows people to want to become experts at ripping off the government?
