Failing Poverty Programs and Social Security Disability Fraud

The 'War on Poverty' began 50 years ago today.


The latest example of massive Social Security Disability fraud is also in the headlines today.


Let's try to connect these two seemingly 'unconnectable' dots.


Poverty programs today are plentiful and managed poorly by hordes of government agencies.


Social Security (and that of many other government managed programs) disability fraud is allowed, albeit not exactly encouraged, by hordes of poorly managed government agencies as well.


As a result, We the People as a whole, including the poor, the truly disabled and the taxpayers, are being cheated as the money entrusted to government agencies is poorly managed, to say the least.


The problem, it seems to me, is that too many government workers don't even pretend to act as trustees or fiduciaries for the money and responsibilities entrusted to them by We the People as taxpayers.


How the War on Poverty Was Lost is subtitled '50 years and $20 trillion later, LBJ's goal to help the poor become self-supporting has failed:'


"On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. "This administration today, here and now," he thundered, "declares unconditional war on poverty in America."

Fifty years later, we're losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren't spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that's not the problem.
In reality, we're losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: "to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."

The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (That figure doesn't include Social Security or Medicare benefits.) Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

LBJ promised that the war on poverty would be an "investment" that would "return its cost manifold to the entire economy." But the country has invested $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years. What does America have to show for its investment? Apparently, almost nothing: The official poverty rate persists with little improvement.

            

That is in part because the government's poverty figures are misleading. Census defines a family as poor based on income level but doesn't count welfare benefits as a form of income. Thus, government means-tested spending can grow infinitely while the poverty rate remains stagnant.

Not even government, though, can spend $9,000 per recipient a year and have no impact on living standards. And it shows: Current poverty has little resemblance to poverty 50 years ago. According to a variety of government sources, including census data and surveys by federal agencies, the typical American living below the poverty level in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. His home is larger than the home of the average nonpoor French, German or English man. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.

Do higher living standards for the poor mean that the war on poverty has succeeded? No. To judge the effort, consider LBJ's original aim. He sought to give poor Americans "opportunity not doles," planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it. In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans' capacity to support themselves, transforming "taxeaters" into "taxpayers." It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes.

By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe."

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And now let's look briefly at the latest example of widespread government enabled fraud on taxpayer supported programs in Charges for 106 in Huge Fraud Over Disability:

"The retired New York City police officers and firefighters showed up for their psychiatric exams disheveled and disoriented, most following a nearly identical script.         

They had been coached on how to fail memory tests, feign panic attacks and, if they had worked during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to talk about their fear of airplanes and entering skyscrapers, prosecutors said. And they were told to make it clear they could not leave the house, much less find a job.       

But their Facebook pages told investigators a starkly different story, according to an indictment and other court papers.

Former police officers who had told government doctors they were too mentally scarred to leave home had posted photographs of themselves fishing, riding motorcycles, driving water scooters, flying helicopters and playing basketball.

“The brazenness is shocking,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said on Tuesday.

The online photos, along with intercepted phone calls and the testimony of undercover officers, were evidence of what officials said was the largest fraud ever perpetrated against the Social Security disability system, a scheme stretching back to 1988 in which as many as 1,000 people — many of them officers and firefighters already collecting pensions from the city — were suspected to have bilked the federal government out of an estimated $400 million."

Summing Up 

To coin an admittedly awkward but descriptive phrase, "It's the bureaucratic government culture and the freebie entitlement mentality it has created, Stupid!"

And that's largely the fault of huge, intrusive, poorly run and inappropriate government programs, regulations and the overall government knows best bureaucratic approach originally intended and approved by We the People to aid those in need of help.


Our taxpayers willingly provide the money to do the job, but too much of that provided is being squandered and mismanaged by those in charge of disbursing it properly. Too often they don't even try to do the right thing.

So here's perhaps a better and certainly a shorter description of what ails us: It's the bureaucrats, Stupid!

We the People are providing more than enough money to do the right things for those in need of our support. Too much of our money is being wasted or misspent by unproductive government officials.

The plain fact is that We the People just aren't getting anywhere near what would be an adequate "return on our investment." In fact, our "public servants" aren't even making the effort to handle our money as if it were entrusted to them to be used in a fiduciary manner.

Too many government programs are merely jobs programs for government workers, including schools, and are not "serving" the intended beneficiaries or benefiting society and therefore the taxpayers and We the People.

The customers, aka the genuinely poor and disabled, and financial sponsors and providers, aka the taxpayers, are merely spectators and bystanders, and often innocent ones at that.

This all has to change, of course, but for that to happen, We the People need to first get mad as hell.

When that takes place, the poor will become able, the truly disabled will be helped, and the taxpayers will be getting our money's worth.

As a result, the greatest country on earth will become even greater.

That's my take.

Thanks. Bob.