Removing barriers for work on SSDI

WM WW SS: Untapped Talent in America: Removing Barriers to Work and Supporting Opportunity for Individuals with Disabilities, September 9, 2025

We urge caution in dealing with this subject, as what is of academic interest for social commentators is a matter of life and death for those who live it. People are on disability for two reasons. The first is that work has become a struggle for either physical or mental health reasons. The second is that dealing with disabled workers has become a burden to employers and their supervisors.  This is even the case where workers are extremely talented, especially for those with mental illness, who may be more intelligent than their supervisors but unable to effectively deal with the social situations faced in the workplace.

Start by ending the penalty on working for those who receive retirement or disability benefits prior to full retirement age.

There are two main reasons to encourage the disabled (and the aged) to work. The first is to increase their incomes, primarily because current benefits are too low and there is little appetite for increasing them and the second is to increase the number of low wages into the economy for the benefit of such employers. Neither reason has merit. Workers with untapped talent should be given the opportunity to contribute, but this should not put their current situations at risk. It is much too hard to get onto disability for the risk calculus to make sense.

One way to deal with this is to make getting assistance easier for both having a disability or to simply leave a bad job. In June of 2024, the Center provided comments to both subcommittees on how to do this by creating a program of long-term unemployment insurance, which I will repeat here.

Please see the attachments for more information on how to fund this spending through a system of consumption taxes on both consumers and employers (while decreasing other taxes on the latter).

Taken together, these reforms will remove the punitive features from anti-poverty programs, especially those which require an excess of red tape to participate - especially the earned income tax credit and supplemental security income. By basing benefits on long term unemployment insurance, the period of precarity applicants face while applying for benefits is ended. This experience colors both the desire to return to work and the need to justify continued benefits

Returning to work from disability also has a psychic cost. Participation in psychiatric rehabilitation programs on a longer-term basis than Medicaid Eligibility, as well as educational benefits, will mitigate these fears and, in the post-pandemic world, get people used to leaving home again on a regular basis. Medicare solvency must be discussed within the larger context of health care reform.

If work paid better, going back into it would be easier - even for a shorter period of time. Like the current ticket to work program, benefits should remain in place for a period of months but after that period, should be very easy to restart. Talented individuals could respond to short term opportunities - or even seek them - without having them lead to a long-term obligation for employers.

Supplemental Security Income should be entirely replaced with LTUI as described above. This will end onerous requirements on both recipients and on the government. Individuals with a more substantial work history who have had higher contributions could apply for higher benefit levels or save such advantages for when they reach retirement age.

Individuals on long-term disability or recipients of old age and survivors insurance need more money. Many are in poverty - primarily because they never had a job that was adequate to make the necessary investments that would, in theory, allow Social Security to be a supplement to income rather than its sole source - which is the case for the vast majority of cases.

Under no circumstances should precarity be increased in order to encourage more work. That this is no idle concern, as the recently passed reform did just that regarding both Food Stamp and Medicaid benefits. This is exactly the wrong approach. It also will not work out as planned.

For forced work to be feasible will require forcing employers to hire individuals whose productivity may not justify their efforts and to retain employees who may have challenges. Anti-discrimination laws (including those regarding age) will not only need to be strengthened, doing so may even require criminal enforcement. The other alternative is to provide vastly increased subsidies for employers.

Taking the necessary actions to require that employers actually disabled workers would be the logical outcome of encouraging more work for talented (and less talented) disabled individuals. These committees, especially members of the majority, need to be clear about this fact. So far, efforts to increase requirements on SNAP and Medicaid has included actions to assure that jobs are available - especially those that pay well.

A related subject are disincentives on retirement prior to the full retirement age.

Economists who study the future of work are currently dealing with the question of the decreasing need for workers as artificial intelligence expands.  We believe this concern is overblown. More workers are required to double check the results of generative AI, which can turn out to be questionable. 

Improvements to productivity in general are making the eight hour day unnecessary. More people could have good jobs, rather than marginal ones, if pay rates were increased while hours were cut. Working class, and even factory wages have not kept up with those of management - a product of percentage wage adjustments for inflation being done on a percentage basis rather than distributed in equal dollar amount increments. Because prices follow the 90th percentile of income, most of the nation barely keeps up, with low wage workers, often those with some disability or lack of education, actually losing ground.

Some, if not most, white collar jobs exist to serve the advancement interests of their management, as their pay is increased by having more people to supervise while they look busy. Especially in high skill industries, having people on call to face periods of work - such as the time between the actual enactment of the federal budget and the end of the fiscal year - lead to the kind of bloated payrolls Elon Musk feared but did not understand. The problem is not employees, it is Congress not being able to pass a budget. Shorter work days, with the understanding that extra time may be required at certain times of the year, is a better alternative than having people babysit their computers.

Age discrimination is often a factor in being encouraged to retire early or at all. It is, in fact, implicit. As productivity in the economy advances, discouraging earlier retirement may be counter-productive. Creation of long-term unemployment insurance and making sure it provides adequate income while reforming how both it and Social Security as a whole is funded allows a reconsideration of both the ages for retiring at 62 and for having the full retirement age occur at 67 for those who are now retiring. 

Shifting the funding of what has been the employer contribution to one funded by a goods and services (value added) tax, with equal dollar crediting, ends the question of whether the program includes a subsidy. It does now and certainly will if the program provides adequate income for retirees. Providing higher wages will, as history demonstrates, will result in higher consumption. 

Adding a consumption tax (rather than having be implicit when buried in income taxes) will provide adequate funding to lower the early retirement age to 60 and reduce full retirement age (with the implicit encouragement to keep working without penalty) while removing the penalty for working after early retirement.  Shift full retirement age to 64 as a start, as many who retire early do so at this point anyway, and adjust until there is no bump in when people retire between early and full retirement ages.

Attachment: Consumption Taxes