The Government Entitlement Program That’s About to Dry Up

For years, the Social Security Administration has warned lawmakers that unless they do something soon, the entitlement program for disabled workers will run out of cash by 2016.

Still, as the program’s funds dry up and its insolvency hovers less than two years away, Congress remains quiet on the issue.

More than 11 million Americans currently rely on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which was created in 1956 to provide financial assistance to people unable to work because of severe health issues.

Americans using the program, which is funded through the federal payroll tax, currently collect an average $1,129.51 per month. Most of the beneficiaries rely on disability for a significant portion of their income. Officials estimate that the majority of them never return to the workforce and remain dependent on the government.

The program has swelled in recent years—with rapid growth driving it full speed ahead to insolvency.

Since 2000, SSDI beneficiaries have increased by 73 percent. Experts from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco attribute that partially to population growth, but they also note “disability insurance caseloads as a share of the population age 20 to 64—known as the disability recipiency rate—also have risen rapidly over the past several decades.”

Social Security officials say the increase is related to a number of factors including the aging population as well as a larger number of working women eligible for the program.

Others say the spike in beneficiaries is largely due to a 1984 policy change that expanded the qualifications for disability.

Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Mark Duggan and Scott Imberman released an analysis that found that relaxed medical eligibility criteria was the biggest factor driving the increase in disability beneficiaries.


Spending has ticked up so fast in recent years that revenue can’t keep up. The government has paid out more than it has taken in every year since 2009, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees.

If the pattern continues and the program runs out of money by 2016, the millions of Americans collecting disability will see their benefits cut by at least 20 percent.

Social Security is not an entitlement.

It was earned.

Welfare is entitlement and needs weeding out.

Hell yea!

Yeah but there is a huge difference, Social Security was a socialist program to steal from the people a tax to guarantee the retirement incomes based on a ponzi scheme. Imagine our government being allowed to do that which is against the law because they are the government. But the big question that remains, just who gave them that authority? If it is not within the rights of the people to run a ponzi scheme and the government gains it's powers from the people, how can one delegate a power one doesn't have?

But not to worry, they steal from other area's to fund SSI:



Supplemental Security Income Home Page -- 2014 Edition

Just another entitlement scheme administered by Social Security as an expansion of a power they don't really have to keep things confused. But what is really meant by running out of money is that buying new tanks, drones, rifles and bullets are more important than entitlements. I could partially believe in this, partially being eliminating entitlements but the other half is to eliminate the other also.