SOCIAL SECURITY: THE REAL FRAUD

All the media are doing stories about Social Security, how it's going broke, it's fraud ridden, it's the "new welfare," and unemployed people are using it as a last recourse.  B-A-L-O-N-E-Y.  The media reporting on Social Security is the real fraud.  

If 60 Minutes had done 30 Minutes worth of research, their story on Social Security disability would have been far different.

Consider:

• It isn't broke.  SSDI can pay full benefits until 2036, and 76% of benefits until 2080, without any tax increase or any congressional action.
• Alcoholism and Drug Addiction were excluded by Congress in 1996 and do not qualify for SSDI or SSI benefits (Public Laq 104-121).
• Social Security was established as a self-financing program paid for by FICA taxes (now 12.4%) deducted from each worker's pay and matched by the employers.
• If Congress had not "borrowed" from the Social Security Trust Fund, there would now be $2.6 Trillion in the fund, and no crisis. (That's Trillion with a T, folks).
•  The "insolvency crisis" now is caused by the fact that Congress stole (I'm sorry, "borrowed") the $2.6 trillion from the Social Security trust fund and now has to find a way to put it back.  (Hand in the cookie jar)!
• The disability trust fund has become "insolvent" before.  It was fixed almost a dozen times in the past by a rather minor reapportionment of incoming taxes between the disability trust fund and the retirement trust fund. 
• The US Government does NOT (NOT) pay attorneys' fees when they represent Social Security claimants.  The fees are paid for by the claimants.  If Social Security deducts the fee from the claimant's money and sends it to the attorney as a "direct payment of fees," SSA charges the attorney a service fee of 6.3 percent; thus, the government earns income from this practice.  It costs the government nothing, nada, zero, not one red cent!
• Doctors cannot approve anyone for disability benefits.  
• Finally, no matter how bad the economy gets, people cannot get SSDI simply because they can't find jobs.  As a disability representative who has appeared in hundreds of disability hearings, I say that Social Security has not yet awarded one single dollar in SSDI benefits because the claimant couldn't find work.  You gotta be disabled and you gotta have hard, objective medical evidence to prove it.  Even then, there is a 75 percent chance you will be denied at the initial application level and about a 58 percent chance you will be denied again at the appeal level.

We once depended on the media to keep the politicians from lying to us.  Who can protect us from the media?