Not easy to get disability for aching joints.
Lots of folks see their choices dwindle as they age. It’s just not entirely in everyone’s control to work as long as they want.
If we could only get the govt to be better at policing their payments we would all be better off.
If we could stop people from cheating we would also be better off.
We could start there.
Let’s do some back of the envelope calculations and see if this could possibly be true.
There are 9 million people receiving SS disability. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of them are not in the labor force. Only 1.2 million employed people who receive any kind of disability payment (Workers’ Compensation, Social Security Disability Income, Supplemental Security Income, Veterans Disability Compensation, or any other kind of financial assistance program for people who are disabled) are employed.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/dissup.t06.htm
Now let’s look at people who are in non-white-collar jobs, and are approaching approaching retirement. We’ll define “approaching retirement” as being ages 55-64. We’ll define non-white-collar jobs as:
Service occupations,
Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations,
Production, transportation, and material moving occupations,
because those jobs are conveniently broken out for us. Adding up the numbers of people in those jobs aged 55-64, we find about 8.5 million.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm
So, all the people who work and have any kind of financial assistance for disability: 1.2 million
All the people who work physical jobs and are near retirement age: 8.5 million.
So what TatinG says cannot possibly be true. Even if every single person who is working and who gets any kind of financial disability payment is getting SS disability, and even if every single person who is working and who gets any kind of financial disability payment is between 55 and 64, that’s still not nearly enough. There’s no way 1.2 million is most of 8.5 million.
So we have to dismiss this claim. The people in blue collar jobs who are approaching retirement are not already receiving disability payments. Snatching their retirement away is still unacceptable.
The subject was raising the retirement age. Many people working physically demanding jobs, who are in their late 50’s and early 60’s who have back issues, etc. do take SS disability. It pays almost as much as a low paying job (as one of the articles I posted points out).
I don’t know how the law could raise the retirement age for some types of jobs but not others. That would be completely unfair and unworkable.
But, as I demonstrated, the vast majority of people in those physically demanding jobs DO NOT take SS disability.
Sort of off topic…but about SS. Up until this month, my small SS direct deposit has been on the first of the month. This month it was on October 16. Wondering if anyone else had a date change for their deposit.
Nope. Mom’s came in on 2d or 3d the last few months (including November).
@thumper1, I’d call SS and ask about that. That’s odd.
I thought so too, VH. I’m going to see what happens in November. I also have to check…to see when the September deposit was made. My birthday is the 2nd of the month…and I thought I got my first deposit on the first…but I could be all wrong!
FIL did not take disability, nor has anyone we know from his friends. I still think that raising the retirement age is just making full SS for the rich. The blue/pink etc collar will not last until FRA and will take the reduced amounts.
@thumper1 : If you just started collecting (your comment that “I thought I got my first deposit on the first” is a tad ambiguous), then the “first” one might have been a starter and the 16th (or thereabouts) may be your scheduled date. I agree it makes sense to wait a month or so before dealing with the hold times on the phone. But, is the payment date something that shows if you go to your online account : https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.do
I don’t understand this. Raising the retirement age lowers benefits for everyone, rich or poor, regardless of when you start taking your benefit.
@notrichenough : You have to read the comment by @Singersmom07 in context. Those who need to retire earlier than FRA (let us say, due to physical limitations that do not qualify for disability benefits) cannot afford to wait until an increased FRA (much less age 70). Their reduced benefits increase the pool of money available to pay the higher benefits to those who can afford to wait (before, if ever, SS runs out of money). It’s a legitimate comment. I would like to see a little more understanding on this site that there are a lot of different factual situations that affect people’s options.
That’s not how it works. There’s no “pool of money”. It’s not a zero-sum process.
Those higher benefits are also reduced if the FRA is raised. Raising the FRA is all about reducing benefits to everyone.
Maybe you are positing that if you can afford to wait for FRA you are better able to handle the reduced benefit, but that’s true regardless of what the benefits are. FRA on it’s own is really pretty meaningless - it is primarily just used as a point of reference for setting benefit levels at any particular age. It has/had some other secondary uses for file and suspend and restricted applications and what-not, but much of this is no longer relevant for people under 62.
All that matters is what the benefit is at any age. From this perspective FRA is meaningless.
Lower and middle income people live linger than lower income people on average. So raising the retirement age is taking away a bigger percent of lower income people’s benefits.
A rich 55 year old man (top quintile, the quintile of most CCers) can expect to live to around age 89. A poor 55 year man (lowest quintile, the men who fix your car, haul your garbage and cook your entrees in restaurants) can expect to live to age around 78, and the life expectancy for that quintile has not been rising at all. If you raise the retirement age to 70, you’re taking away a significant part of your garbageman’s retirement so you can pay slightly lower taxes.
@thumper1 - my parents just mentioned that today. Dad gets his on the 3rd, Mom’s is mid-month.
It lowers everybody’s social security benefits by roughly the same percentage, although people who wait until FRA or later actually take a slightly bigger haircut than people who claim before FRA… Life expectancy doesn’t change because FRA changes, so it is not accurate to say it would be taking away a bigger percentage of lower income people’s benefits.
It doesn’t. If I’m 65 and will live one more year , and you are also 65 and will live thirty more years, raising the retirement age to 70 takes away all of my benefits, but it doesn’t take away all of your benefits. Therefore, it takes away a higher percentage of my benefits (all) than it takes away of your benefits (not all).
That’s what happens with rich versus poor. If you take away five years of benefits from a poor person who only expected ten years, and you also take away five years of benefits from a rich person who expected thirty years, you have taken away a lot more of the poor person’s benefits.
That’s not how it works. You are not forced to wait until FRA to start collecting benefits. Regardless of what the FRA age is, you can still start collecting at 62 or any time after that (at least I haven’t heard anyone talking about raising the minimum age).
What changes is the amount of the benefit. If the FRA is raised to 70, the benefit you get will be lowered by around 20% (based on the current formulas, these could always be adjusted). So if the FRA is 70 and you retire at 65, you will get 20% less than when the FRA was 67. But you don’t get zero.
And that 20% reduction applies to everyone, whether you live 5 more years or 30.
But SS has to deal with averages. They’re not going to award benefits to one individual based on that individual’s life expectancy. They award benefits based on the age when you claim and the money you earned during your career.