slatestarscratchpad:

shlevy:

multiheaded1793:

multiheaded1793:

slatestarscratchpad

Let me quote a bit of this:

At a breakfast event Wednesday, Jan. 14 in New Hampshire, the Kentucky Republican and potential presidential candidate spoke out against a public safety net that catches too many people who don’t need help.

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I’m not sure why I was tagged in this, but coincidentally I have a response.

Rand Paul is a doctor. Ron Paul is a doctor. The entire Paul family is loaded with doctors and very familiar with medical practice. They’re coming from a place of experience, but it’s experience very heavily filtered by their specialty and their preconceptions.

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So my impression of the disability system is that it simultaneously lets through lots of people who don’t deserve it while rejecting the people who really need it. It seems to be a clear case of the joint over- and under-diagnosis I’ve written about.

I don’t know enough to know whether the system is reformable, but I’m pretty sure burning it to the ground would hurt way more than it helps. This is part of why I support a basic income guarantee. Give it to everyone, no fuss, no need to spin a web of lies, no need for a two-year vetting process. That would be a principled libertarian solution Rand Paul should be able to get behind.

Disability insurance and workers’ comp fraud is, even more than unfaithful spouses, the bread and butter of private eyes. Because hiring a guy at $50 an hour to sit outside people’s house for days hoping to take a picture of someone claiming they’re in too much pain to perform remunerative work puttering around doing home improvement pays off.

You know what federal initiatives came before and served as a precedent for Social Security*? Railroad retirement and disability. America used to run on rails, and even in the Lochner era they could be put across as a matter of interstate commerce.

And how’s that going? Well, in the absence of any effort to root out fraud, a few years ago it turned out the Long Island Rail Road was running a 97% reported disability rate.

(* the other obvious precedent would be wartime soldiers’ pensions, which used to be a major line item in the federal budget. Like, over and above the major current VA and &tc. share of the federal budget.

You know, on several different occasions American war veterans have laid siege to the national capital demanding money.

The postwar ejection of women from industrial work, the G.I. Bill, and to an extent the development of the Cold War military-industrial complex came to forestall another go-round. It was not immediately clear that the economy wouldn’t return to Depression, only with the whole population primed for war and trained to think of the USSR as a friend.

Remember, disgruntled veterans were the core of all the European interwar revolutions, socialist AND fascist. So, best to keep them occupied. And it worked! It was a whole two and a half decades before a mob with veterans at its core laid siege to the capital demanding surrender in a foreign war.)

Also, I am flinching in anticipation of when the New York Post discovers this blue website, connects the dots between tumblr-sympathetic but otherwise unpopular themes, and runs a headline reading “Communist Trannies Are Encouraging Your Kids to Run Away, Cut Off Their Dicks with Obamacare, Become Whores, and Claim Disability Because Working Makes Them Sad”.