I agree. We've had low-grade BI for a certain % of the population for a long time as a cost of staving off social disorders and disasters. (Or as the author below puts it, so LA doesn't burn to the ground).

It masquerades under the pretense of "questions asked, must have disability", but the two programs really are no questions asked, as long as you fit a certain demographic (and the two serve very different demos - SSI is for inner city people who have never worked and may never, ever. Most people who have had a driveway at one point in their lives have never even heard of it and cannot get it. SSDI is for rural and rest-belt.)

SSDI and also SSI (Supplemental Security Income, no relation to Social Security, and does not come from social security taxes) are medicalizing UBI in order to put it into a form that Americans will accept.

The Last Psychiatrist wrote two articles about each of these in 2010 and 2013 saying that they were essentially a UBI that Americans would accept. He deleted the articles in 2015 when his anonymity was dispelled. I think they make poignant summaries and that its an important topics, so here they are.

The Terrible, Awful Truth About Supplemental Security Income (2010):

https://web.archive.org/web/20130527155520/http://thelastpsy...

> The rise of psychiatry parallels the rise of poverty in industrialized societies. The reason you see psychiatry in the U.S. but not in the Sudan isn't because there's no money for it in the Sudan, but because there is not enough money in the US to make some people feel comparatively like they're not in the Sudan. Hence Zoloft. It is the government's last resort to a social problem it may or may not have created, whatever, but has absolutely no other way of dealing with. Predictably, world psychiatry will also be the temporary solution to world poverty until the aliens return to see what became of their 6000 year experiment. So invest in Pfizer, it will only go up. It has to.

The terrible, awful truth about SSDI (2013):

https://web.archive.org/web/20130420171159/http://thelastpsy...

> I know, the idea of people getting paid for nothing gives me the heebie jeebies as well, I'd want to shrug, too. But the point here is not whether poor people deserve living wages, the point, again, is that since this is precisely what they are getting, already and irrevocably, can we do it more efficiently, cheaply? Why do we have to go through all this bureaucracy that massively inflates the costs-- for example, Medicaid (the poor have to first become "patients" and get meds to get disabled, after all)? Why not more efficiently deliver the "assistance"? Cut out the middlemen-- send them directly to an ATM? I see how that might lead to an "entitlement culture", but isn't "disability culture" actually worse AND more expensive?

> But no one would stand for it. You, we, I, everyone, will gladly pay more in taxes or plunge deeper into galactic sized debt to not see the reality that some will get money just because, so that we can lie to ourselves that the "disability system" isn't supposed to be used this way, they are gaming it. The problem is not economics, the problem is psychology. You're paying extra for the deniability. Is it worth it?