> The one thing that is annoying me so far, though, is that
> Whitaker seems to be using the "productive member of society"
> trope to subtly persuade. In other words, he's saying that
> rise in the number of people collecting SSI/SSDI payments
> is alarming because there are so many unproductive members
> of society who aren't holding down jobs.
I've always wondered why the Free Market types don't just forget about this kind of thing (call it, I don't know, a "cost of doing business" ...?), because really: if The Market was suffering from a lack of workers, we'd all hear about it. But in this part of the cycle, we're missing about 13M jobs. If anything, those who can't/won't work are helping to keep down the (official) unemployment rate :-)
A la toys-for-guns, I'd love to see someone say "I'll give you a good paying job with benefits if you stop taking those wretched drugs" ... then I guess I could take something like Whitaker's complaint seriously.
/jordan