"TrimTabs on Debt and Disability Claims: How Much Debt Does it Take to Generate $1 in GDP? Disability Fraud vs. Expiring Unemployment Benefits Revisited"

We've been following some smart people on this subject, from before Bloomberg did their big story on May 2nd.
Here's a paper in Montana  linking to some guy in D.C., Feb. 18:
Geographic Areas to Short When the Debt Bomb Goes Off

A bit of hyperbole in the headline. It's not a bomb and besides, the problem will be the interest rather than the debt per se.

I'm not sure how to use this but thank the New York Times for putting together this interactive map of the counties most dependent on Federal transfer payments,

What I'd really like to see is a list of the counties with the highest levels of Social Security Disability fraud, this is a program ripe for reform.

As Robert Samuelson wrote for the Washington post (via the Billings Gazette)...

And a couple days later:

Jobless Disability Claims soar to record $200B as of January

It's a big deal.

From Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis (Trim Tabs speaking):

...In his blog post Shedlock reported, “Since mid-2010, precisely the time million of U.S. citizens used up all of their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, disability claims have risen by 2.2 million.”

Mish's observation prompted us to dig a little deeper into the relationship between the number of people exhausting extended and emergency unemployment benefits compared to the increase in disability recipients. What we discovered was interesting, to say the least.

click on chart for sharper image

From July 2010 to April 2012, the decline in the number of people collecting extended and emergency unemployment benefits was 2.46 million. Over the same time period the number of people collecting disability benefits increased by 2.20 million. We suspect the similarity in the inverse relationship is more than coincidence....MORE