Interesting story on SS. Remember, someone

Posted on: July 17, 2017 at 16:43:03 CT

keeps RE-electing these people.

A
reader weighs in on our item last week about the Social Security trustees pushing back the date of reckoning for the disability trust fund to 2028.

Their rationale is that many people who might apply for disability will have turned 62 and will take old-age benefits instead. “That may be true in part,” our reader writes, “but there is another reason they don’t want people to know about until it is too late.

“Seems at some point they also changed the requirements to qualify for SS disability. In 2014 I was injured and after surgery, recovery and therapy found I could no longer work at my trade. So in 2015 I went to apply for SS disability. That’s when I found out I no longer qualified under the new requirements. The old requirements were a points system based on your lifetime contributions and you had to have 30 or more points to qualify. That is still the case, but they added that 20 of those 30 points had to be from the 10 years prior to the disability claim.

“The kicker: In 2008 I was downsized out of my well-paying company job (as were a great many others) and to make ends meet became self-employed at a greatly reduced income. This also drastically reduced my SS contributions. Back to 2015, I found that I had more than the 30 required points from lifetime contributions, but because of my recently reduced contributions I did not meet the 20 points from the previous 10-year requirement. So no SS disability.

“This is probably the case for the millions who had the same thing happen to them in 2008/9, and so they also no longer qualify for SS disability, whether they know it or not. This means the SS trust(less)ees no longer have to count them as possible disability applicants. Voila! The SS disability trust fund is saved!

“Another way our fearless political leaders and their bureaucrat minions figured out to not have to make good on their promises we have all been paying for all our lives.”