CBPP Updates Chart Book and Paper on Disability Insurance

We’ve updated two important pieces about Disability Insurance (DI), an integral part of Social Security that protects workers who can’t support themselves anymore because of a severe medical impairment, to reflect the recent Social Security trustees’ report.

The first of those pieces, our popular chart book, presents nearly two dozen graphs that tell policymakers and citizens key DI facts:  why it’s important, why the DI rolls have grown, who receives benefits, and what financing issues the program faces.  The chart below, for example, shows that nearly 9 million workers receive benefits from DI, while DI protects 150 million if a devastating disability strikes them.

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The second, our recent paper, explains why, as my colleague Paul Van de Water reminded us, lawmakers must allocate a slightly bigger share of the current payroll tax to DI by 2016.  The Social Security payroll tax, which is 6.2 percent of wages up to $117,000 in 2014, which both employers and employees pay, finances the retirement and survivor programs (5.3 percent) and the disability program (0.9 percent.)  Simply revising that split — as policymakers have done 11 times in the past, in either direction — would avert a sharp and wholly unnecessary benefit cut in 2016 while policymakers work on the more important issue:  ensuring overall Social Security solvency.

These are just two of the many analyses we’ve done on this vital program.  Check out our collection here and related blog posts here.