EDITORIAL: How a strong economy is helping people with disabilities

May 04-- May 4--Most news about Social Security and other government pension programs is bad news, with obligations outpacing income and dire troubles ahead. But the latest news on the Social Security disability program could hardly be better.

In 2015, the Disability Insurance fund was in danger of not being able to cover all its commitments by 2016. Congress responded by temporarily boosting the share of payroll tax revenue designated for the DI fund. In the trustees' report that came out last month, the picture is far better. They figure it will be able to cover full benefits until 2052.

What's changed? The economy, for one thing. It's booming. As Friday's Labor Department report emphatically confirmed, the Great American Jobs Machine continues to roar along, creating 263,000 jobs in April and bringing the unemployment rate down to 3.6 percent. The last time it was that low was 1969.

One happy result is the expansion of employment options available to people with physical limitations or mental health conditions. Disability rates, the trustees note, "tend to increase temporarily in bad economic times."

Some workers who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and couldn't find new ones were able to qualify for disability benefits. Some of those who went on disability may have been reluctant to take new jobs for fear they wouldn't last. The longer they stayed out of the labor force, the more their marketable skills eroded.

For some, disability payments took the place of unemployment insurance. The Washington Post reported in 2017 that in some rural towns, "as many as one-third of working-age adults live on monthly disability checks."

But when the job market improved, some people who might have been able to qualify have sought employment -- and employers have been ready to take on workers they might have passed over before. As the trustees note, the share of Americans awarded new benefits "rose sharply in the recent recession, and has declined since the peak in 2010 to an extraordinarily low level by 2016."

Last year, Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Slok marveled at the turnaround. "This is a big deal," he told The New York Times. "We thought the numbers for disability would go up forever." The DI fund has benefited in two ways: More people paying in and fewer applying to collect benefits. Outlays, which nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013, have barely grown since then.

Not all of the improvement stems from the economy. The Social Security Administration has also tightened up its review of applications. Administrative law judges with unusually high approval rates were retrained. Between 2008 and 2015, the rate of successful appeals fell by nearly one-third.

The government has a duty to support workers whose illnesses or injuries make it impossible for them to take a job. But it also has to be a conscientious steward of the money provided by taxpayers.

For a long time, the disability fund was a story that kept getting worse. Thanks in part to a robust economy, the employment picture is brighter for all Americans, including those with disabilities.

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