I’ll Just Crush the Stupid Stuff in the Social Media about Disability Claims. In Reality, Claims Dropped to 20

Look, I’m going to use some technical terms for a moment. I’m just a one-man show. I can’t lean against the tsunami of stupid BS washing over the internet. But this stuff got to me. So, there’s this stupid BS washing over the internet that disability claims have been spiking and that these spiking disability claims somehow hide the true nature of unemployment, or whatever. So I’m going to crush that with data: People with a disability are working in record numbers, while disability claims have dropped to a 20-year low, and people receiving disability benefits per 1,000 insured workers have dropped to a 40-year low.

The acceptance in Corporate America of working from home on a scale never seen before and the tight labor market over the past few years has been hugely beneficial for people with a disability who now no longer need to struggle with arduous or impossible commutes, and who may have special medical needs that are easier to attend to at home.

The number of people “with a disability” who were working in July jumped to 7.76 million, the highest in the data going back to 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday as part of its employment report. This was up by 2.0 million, or by 35%, from just before the pandemic in January 2020!

The number of people with a disability in the labor force – either looking for work or working – spiked by 34%, or by 2.1 million people, since January 2020, to a record 8.3 million! Their number started rising in early 2021 amid the new flexibility by employers about working from home and a historic demand for labor and labor shortages.

These are huge gains that people with a disability have made in the labor market. Having these additional 2.1 million people in the labor force, who weren’t there in January 2020, is a big benefit for the US economy on all kinds of levels.

The number of people who applied for disability benefits in the calendar year 2022 dropped to 1.79 million, the lowest since 2002, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA), which administers the Disability Program. Note how the long drop since 2009 is now flattening out. Obviously, it’s not going to zero.

This plunge of 39% since 2010 occurred even as the total US population has increased by 16%!

On a quarterly basis through Q2 2023, disability claims have flattened out at very low levels. We see this in the annual chart above. This data is volatile with big swings from quarter to quarter:

Disability awards – people actually getting approved for disability benefits – dropped to 543,400 in the calendar year 2022, the lowest in over 30 years, despite 30 years of population growth, and down by roughly half since 2010:

Disability awards in relationship to insured workers has plunged to 3.4 disability awards per 1,000 insured workers, a 40 years low. Only 1982 was lower, in the data that goes back to 1981:

At the end of calendar year 2022, the total number of people being paid disability benefits dropped to 7.60 million, the lowest since 2008. So far this year, the number dropped further to 7.52 million in June (green).

Sure, there are complaints that the disability system is hard to use, that it’s hard to get approved, that there are many bizarre rules and pitfalls, that the whole process takes forever, and that if someone finally gets approved, the amounts are small. These are policy issues, and it’s not my purpose here to weigh in on them. I just wanted to go out and crush some stupid stuff on the internet while showing an important aspect of the US economy.

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