Article content

Two Canadian economists, UBC’s Kevin Milligan and Wilfrid Laurier’s Tammy Schirle, have published a new working paper on a subject dear to my heart: the high use of disability insurance, particularly Social Security disability insurance, in the United States. At the end of March 2017, the monthly report from the U.S. Social Security Administration declared that the country has almost exactly 14 million people under the age of 65 receiving some sort of federal disability payment.

This figure includes spouses and dependents of disabled workers, and a few children receiving supplemental income on the grounds of their own disability. The number of actual workers judged to be no longer capable of work, and collecting on Social Security disability insurance earned during their careers, is listed as 8,778,000.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Colby Cosh: How the 1% accidentally pushed so many Americans onto the disability dole (and why it didn’t happen in Canada) Back to video

The overall working-age population of the U.S., ranging from ages 15 to 64, stands at about 205 million. So even if we generously leave teenagers in the denominator, that’s about four per cent of the American working-age public on disability—from one particular federal program (admittedly the dominant one). However, that quotient does not include any veterans with a service-related disability (there were close to four million of those in 2015), anybody on a state disability program, anybody in a worker’s compensation scheme, or anyone receiving private disability insurance.