This is true, but given that unemployment in the US is still sitting at 7% (or whatever -- pick your favorite metric), we as a society have a strong incentive for them not to try. It's much better for all of us that they be comfortable and (importantly!) consuming in the marketplace than that they be destitute and looking for work.
And even so, the disincentive thing really isn't a macro-scale problem. During the boom years in the late 90's, for example, we came very (some might say perilously, heh) close to full employment. If this policy, which is broadly unchnaged from what it was 15 years ago, was really a drag on the labor economy, it would have been visible then. It really wasn't.
> It's much better for all of us that they be comfortable and (importantly!) consuming in the marketplace than that they be destitute and looking for work.
This seems like a false dilemma: Either they're on disability and consuming, or they're not on disability and destitute, with no middle ground. Grandparent's anecdote is about disability that "could be remedied fairly easily," with the implication that the "remedy" in this case might be "rent is due next week."
Right, but the point of the second paragraph is that (in the aggregate) it's really not a dilemma at all. In conditions of very high employment (with the rising wages and physical mobility that entails) these people tend to go off disability (or not go on it at all) and enter the workforce for the simple reason that there is money available.
My point isn't that it's a perfect system, just that it scales the way you want it to and we should be wary of changing it just to stick it to some lazy good for nothings. Right now, like it or not, disability backfills a lot of what a "welfare" or "guaranteed income" program would be doing, and mucking with it risks severe poverty for its users and economic damage to the rest of us.
> we should be wary of changing it just to stick it to some lazy good for nothings.
I agree with you there, at least insofar as any change I can think of to stick it to them would also probably hurt the people the system was designed to help. I'd rather fund a few deadbeats than a genuinely disabled person go hungry, if given no other choice.
I guess I just fail to see how reducing the number of people on disability could, taken in isolation, result in economic damage to the rest of us.
If you add 4.8% people on well-fare, 2% convicts, some percentage of people that sustain themselves via petty crimes, and large number of government employees that don't do anything actually useful and also employees that are employed by private sector and their employer would like to fire them because they cost more then they are worth, but can't fire them due to various mass agreement, union restrictions and general PR ..... you end up with pretty high number number.
And even so, the disincentive thing really isn't a macro-scale problem. During the boom years in the late 90's, for example, we came very (some might say perilously, heh) close to full employment. If this policy, which is broadly unchnaged from what it was 15 years ago, was really a drag on the labor economy, it would have been visible then. It really wasn't.