Immigration and Disability Fraud – A Look at the Data
I have taken down this post because there was an error in the data. Thanks to reader Mike B for spotting it. My apologies to readers. I am embarassed.
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In my experience the greatest variable that effects disability fraud or insurance fraud is the existence of lawyers. If we get rid of them fraud goes way down ……. just tossing that out there 🙂
And the point is? You want to go where with this unending cascade of research and analysis? What do you wish to establish? Is there to be some sort of Official Scale of Undeserving Immigrants which we can use to decide that it is “safe” to admit several thousand Bavarians and Belgians each year to the US. but inadvisable to let in more than a few dozen Zambians and Malaysians? Is this is to establish government policy for decades to come? You want us to learn that immigrants are bad and ignorant and untrustworthy, and that we need to see this with great clarity? What next, that they smell funny and eat strange foods?
Bronco,
🙂
Mike Shupp,
Immigrants are people like everyone else. Some are good, some are bad. Some integrate well, some don’t. Is it really offensive to prefer immigrants who don’t commit fraud over those who do?
So can I drop you a line with the other kind hearted people who are going to come up with Trump’s immigration transition team?
You have found relationships between PctWDisability (which I assume means people getting disability benefits) and predictors that don’t agree with what you think they should be if PctWDisability reflects real disability. However, there are two reasons they can differ – non-disabled people getting benefits or disabled people not getting benefits. I think at least for SSDI, the latter category is much larger than the former. For example, it’s not easy getting SSDI benefits, so not speaking English well could reduce the ability of really disabled people to get benefits.
As far as the relation between disability benefits and family size, in your tables of the top 10 and bottom 10 income countries, in every case, the percent disabled is the family size rounded to the nearest 0.1 (e.g., family size 3.14 gives 3.1% disability). The probability of this happening by chance is extremely small, so I think you have a problem in your data.
Even if you used the correct data, the coefficient for family size is 0.011, which suggests that a difference of 2 in family size (approximately the largest difference in the countries in you tables) corresponds to a 0.022% increase in disability, which is trivial. (Of course, perhaps PctWDisability is actually the fraction disabled, not the percent, in which case this would be 2.2% – this is what I’d expect you to get if your data is bad as suggested above.)
If you’re going to accuse people of fraud, I think you should have some evidence.
Maybe it’s me, but I also think the type of work done by a disabled person must be a large part of such “data”.
I worked in a bank, so my years of back pain, surgeries, etc. (which kept me from doing almost all physical activity) was something I could work through. If I had to carry a brick from here to there, there is no chance in the world I could have worked.
But I am sure that is dependent on which country I originally came form, as Mike will surely prove.
Mike B,
Urg. I am embarassed. I made a mistake cleaning the on disability rates. You are correct.
I’m glad that Mike’s now posting directly in his name and that Dan and Run are no longer serving directly as his pass-through. But this blog is known as left-of-center, and the decision to have it serve as a forum for what effectively is an Aryan message clothed in the transparently false claim that the data this guy uses proves his points—and now his attempt at bald assistance to Paul Ryan in signing Ryan’s Randian fiscal legislation—amounts to a tacit lie.
As in: “Seeeee. Even the left-of-center economics and political blog Angry Bear is supporting the Ryan hatchet to the part of the social safety net that serves unemployed and other low-income ‘others’. And offers data to support it!”
There are many, many blogs and other websites that would welcome this stuff, but they wouldn’t give provide cover for it as a left-of-center outlet, as this one is doing.
I had planned today to put up a post titled “Will Nixon Go to China Again?,” linking to one after another after another article, three or four from the NYT and the Washington Post published in the last two days, showing data that ACTUALLY proves the point of the articles: that in several Rust Belt congressional districts—southeastern Michigan, the Canton, OH area, Erie County, PA—there were massive swings from Obama in 2012 to Trump on Tuesday. Percentage shifts in the high teens or low 20s, from +16, or +22 for Obama four years ago to +6 or +2 for Trump. Another article profiles people in Indianapolis who work at the soon-to-be-shuttered Carrier plant there, who voted for Obama twice and Trump this time.
The point of my post would be to note how profoundly cynical and fraudulent it would be for Trump to turn over to Pence his administration’s fiscal policy decisions, or to Ryan, which is what turning it over to Pence would constitute. If Trump wants to see a truly ugly rise in the dire financial plight of unemployed or no-longer-union-job-employed people and their dependents, in cities like Canton, Oh, Erie, PA, and “the Downrivers” in southeastern Michigan—and in rural areas and small towns elsewhere in the Midwest and in Appalachia—with the significant political fallout that the Republican establishment thinks won’t happen, but that surely WILL happen now that progressives are about to gain control of the Democratic Party, he should go right ahead and gut the social safety net that is keeping afloat, if barely so, the economies of these regions and many, many of their residents.
Both political parties are waking up, finally, to the realization that the culture wars that mattered so much politically for so long, and that was why pols (including, so starkly, Hillary Clinton, and the likes of Chuck Schumer, but also very prominently Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, et al.) mistook the cultural divide between educated middle- and upper-middle-class white voters and downscale white voters for a fiscal, regulatory, campaign-finance-law, corporate power, and spiraling-inequality agenda divide.
In fact, there is precious little daylight between the educated white voters and working-class white voters on actual fiscal, regulatory and campaign-finance-law issues. And this may well be sinking in with the Republican establishment, just as it is, finally, with the Democratic one. And pathological Randians like Ryan, and corporatists like McConnell, may well have an epiphany that these next two years will be their only chance to enact into federal law Atlas Shrugged. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others, are WATCHING. And If Trump signs this stuff into law, the Republicans will lose both houses of Congress in 2018 and the White House as well in 2020. But 2020 is a long way off.
Which brings me back to my point about why a left-of-center economics and political blog would offer assistance to Ryan in his quest to steamroll or trick Trump into agreeing to sweeping Randian policy, if despite the Mercers and the Ricketts, he would rather not see further collapse of downscale rural, small-town and Rust Belt families and lives.
Especially since Trump is extremely susceptible to manipulation by the billionaires who helped fund his campaign, by all reports.
Beverly Mann,
As I noted before, my position on immigration is pretty much the position held by the mainstream (and even far left types like Cesar Chavez) for California Democrats circa 1990. California being ahead of the rest of the country, I’m going to guess that means it was mainstream Democrat position in much of the rest of the US more recently than that.
I suspect the transition began with Bill Clinton – here’s the 1996 Democrat National Committee Platform: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29611
This is very different from 4 years earlier, when the platform said no more than this:
Obviously, something changed from 1992 to 1996.
You did indeed make that assertion about Cesar Chavez. And it was challenged by a commenter–I can’t remember who–with links to articles quoting Chavez suggesting otherwise.
And I don’t JUST mean that Chavez never attacked immigrant Mexicans of other Latinos for their slothish culture transported with them to Mexico.
In any event, your claim that all you did was say pretty much what Chavez said–mainstream stuff–is false. Unless Chavez and mainstreamers were saying that, say, Middle Easterners who immigrated to southeastern Michigan and opened small businesses were a drain on GDP and that this was so cuz of their culture.
Oh, and here’s a link to a Politico article published today about the rural Rust Belt in 2012 and this time. And how important their vote was to Trump’s victory. And why the voted in such large numbers, at all an for Trump:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-rural-voters-trump-231266
Doesn’t sound like they’re likely to be fans of Ayn Rand. Or Paul Ryan.
And the areas mentioned, btw, in Iowa and, especially, Michigan were Sanders strongholds in the caucuses and the primaries. They could have voted for Trump. But they voted for Sanders instead. Sanders did better than Trump, by a lot, I believe, numerically in both states.
And, again, Sanders is WATCHING TRUMP. And he’s not a shy guy.
That was Longttooth, and as I noted to him:
See my response to Longttooth again.
And this is a surprise to whom? I’ve stated only that these are people who want to put on the table for their family and see that they have less of a chance to do it now than their parents did a generation ago. Popping that into Google Translate doesn’t yield “strong support for Ayn Rand or Paul Ryan” in any of the languages they carry.
Bev,
His thoughts on chavez are as cherry picked as his “dats points”.
And you are correct in your summation of his ideology.