April 1, 2013

Trends with benefits, This American Life drinks the kool aide.

I was yelling at my car sound system this morning. The podcast of This American Life was playing the march 22 episode, Trends With Benefits, and it was rightwing radio hour.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2013/03/trends-with-benefits-web-extra

The story was the long term upward trend of Americans receiving disability benefits, how they track other trends (unemployment and the de-industrialization of our economy), but beyond the actual facts was an underlying theme of, well, Cadillac Welfare Queen, is what came to mind.

This sentence grabbed my attention:

Well no really it isn't. The vast majority of people on disability are people who have not made a choice at all, they have serious physical or mental problems that offer them no choice but to try to get by on the miserable disability stipend.

I wanted to strangle Chana Joffe-Walt, the author of the piece, when I heard that sentence. Interestingly, apparently I was not the only potential neck wringer as the web site notes that sentence has been revised to read