‘Disabled or desperate?’ How about ‘on the dole?’
The Washington Post recently published a remarkable story on an Alabama man who hasn’t found a job in a year, is fending off bill collectors, and is contemplating — based on a bad knee — applying for Social Security Disability or Supplemental Security Income.
He is 39 years old and should he qualify for SSI or SSD, he knows he will likely be supported by the government for the rest of his life and will never work again, but will spend his days watching TV.
The story was headlined “Disabled or just desperate? Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up.”
According to the article, the man’s entire family, including his mother, his stepfather and his girlfriend, as well as many members of his church, were already suffering from various ailments and were on SSD (for those who have paid into Social Security) or SSI (for those who haven’t).
The Alabama man lives on the southern edge of Appalachia, in rural America where mines and farms failed long ago and towns have died out, but families continue to live clinging to the same hillsides for generations.
He is a “non-Hispanic White” man — NHW in sociological research — with less than a college education.
Maps of the United States showing the highest concentrations of people on SSI, areas hardest hit by the opioid crisis and the highest levels of rural poverty and joblessness all form one big blob over West Virginia, ground zero for hopelessness, and spread out from there.
And if you were to go out into those areas, you would see billboards paid for by small-town lawyers advertising, “We’ll get you your Social Security.”
I saw those billboards in western Kentucky in the early 1990s when it was already an economic necessity for people in their 50s in an area that had never had any industry, to get on Social Security. There was no other source of income and nowhere else to go.
I have always thought SSD and SSI are misnomers and should be titled something like “permanent unemployment insurance for folks who have not quite reached Social Security and Medicare age.”
The Baby Boomers are passing through the far side of middle age and in several parts of the country more people are dying than are being born.
In Maine, for example, a government-funded program is training immigrants – Indians, Somalis and others – to become EMTs to serve its large aging population. This is one example of why we need immigrants.
America is not as mobile as it used to be. Older Americans are less willing or able to pick up and move across country for a job.
They have little enthusiasm for retraining for jobs to see them over the finish line from their 50s to Social Security and Medicare, especially when they can have some Social Security and health care now.
One recent survey of Pennsylvania coal miners found that most of them would rather become farmers than solar panel installers, even though small family farming is far more of a dead end than coal mining.
The Post’s headline question, “disabled or just desperate?” answers itself.
DISABLED >> PAGE 17