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Invasion Of The "Zombie Crazies"
Submitted by Bill Bonner via Acting-Man blog,
With the European Central Bank in QE mode, stocks should be catching a bid. Instead, they seem to be following commodities – down. But who knows? The situation is so crazy that only a disabled person could understand it.
Why do we say that?
Because a report released last week told us that one out of every three people on Social Security’s disability program is a mental defective. In Washington, DC, the rate of nuttiness among the disabled is even higher – 42%. No surprise there.
And just to show we’re not making this up, here’s the report from CNSNews.com:
“One in three, or 35.2%, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Washington, DC, the seat of the federal government, ranked in the top-10 list of states where disabled beneficiaries were diagnosed with mental problems.
In 2013, the latest data from SSA show there were 10,228,364 disabled beneficiaries, up 139,625 from 2012 when there were 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries.
Disabled beneficiaries have increased 49.7% from a decade ago in 2003 when there were 6,830,714 beneficiaries; and the number is up 14.3% from the 8,945,376 beneficiaries in 2009, the year President Obama took office.”
Who better to understand what is going on in the financial world than a crazy person? Fortunately, America’s zombies are going crazy in ever-greater numbers.
Young person preparing to understand the markets
Multiplying Zombies
Look, central banks are using money they don’t have to buy “assets” – usually government IOUs (bonds) – from banks and other financial institutions such as pension funds. In other words, liabilities of governments, at whose whistle the central banks wag their tails.
They also happen to be liabilities that governments have no intention of honoring. That is why central banks are buying them: to suppress yields (and therefore governments’ debt service costs) and to drive up inflation (thereby reducing the value of the outstanding debt). Are you following, dear reader?
European governments – as well as those in North America and Japan – are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with their promises – especially their promises to zombies… oops… we mean old people. All over the developed world, health care and pension programs are underfunded… or completely unfunded. Economies are slowing. Citizens are aging.
Zombie populations (people who live at others’ expense – some disabled … some crazy … and some very clever people) are multiplying. And if government-debt-to-GDP tests were administered like highway Breathalyzers, they’d be way over the limit.
Negative Yields
You see, it’s the private sector that ultimately pays the bills. In France, for example, the private sector is only about 40% of the economy. The rest is government.
But the shrinking French private sector has to carry the weight of government spending… as well as government debt that is more than twice its size (90% of GDP). But here’s the really crazy thing: France’s government debt trades at the highest prices in history… so high the yields are negative after you factor in inflation.
The French 10-year sovereign bond yields all of 0.5%. Over the last five years, consumer price inflation has averaged between 1.5% and 2%. Conclusion: Either inflation is going a lot lower, and will stay there for years, or investors are going to lose money.
There is $4.6 trillion of government debt in this negative-yield category. And so along comes the central bank bidding driving yields down further! Have we ever seen anything like it? Not that we can think of. The ECB is buying assets at record prices. And to what end? To drive prices even higher!
French 2-year government bond yields have turned negative as well – click to enlarge.
Unfunded Liabilities
Back in the US, many Diary readers have written to protest. They may be on the list of Social Security recipients. But they are not zombies, they tell us. They paid into the fund for many years (as we did). They earned the money honestly. And Social Security is just a pension plan in which they were, often unwilling, participants.
So hold the “zombie” badge for someone else! Yeah. Yeah. We turn to Google. We type: “social security unfunded liabilities.” What do we find? Here’s a report from 2013, again from CNSNews.com:
“The Social Security program faces $9.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years, which is up $1 trillion from last year’s projection of $8.6 trillion, according to the latest report from Social Security’s board of trustees.
The unfunded liability is the amount that has been promised in benefits to people now alive that will not be funded by the tax revenue the system is expected to take in to pay for those benefits. (The Social Security trustees calculate the unfunded liability for a period of 75 years into the future, from 2012 to 2087.)”
How can Social Security’s honest pension fund participants expect to get almost $10 trillion more than they put in? How can governments facing that kind of obligation borrow at less than the rate of inflation? How can central banks put a $1.3 trillion bid under the priciest bond market in history?
Go figure. Maybe the fruitcakes in Washington can make sense of it.
Slightly dated numbers from a Heritage Foundation report on social security deficits to come – these figures have now worsened once again …
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WTF to you expect when they classify disagreeing with authority figures a mental condition.
If I Bruce Jennered myself would I qualify for SS disability?
More importantly, would medicaid cover the Jennering?
DSM5....great for gun control.
Once our bond rates are all negative, we can all borrow a billion dollars, and live a swell life of the negative interest rates. Banksters one and all.
Ze problem, it is solv-ed,
Mental illness is easy to fake and almost impossible to disprove.
There isn't an epidemic of mental illness. It's an epidemic of lazy fraudulent liars.
"You talkin' bout CONgress, Willard?"
The human race is insane. Don't believe me? Sex, religion, politics, race, etc. -- "Talk amongst yourselves."
I distinguish between humankind and mankind.
Mankind is the insane group - they are lacking in cerebral control.
Then there's womankind!
What a bunch of pathological wackos!
Earlir comments on this thread referred to Bruce Jenner. It's Bruce Gendered. There, fixed it.
0b1knob
"Mental illness is easy to fake and almost impossible to disprove."
Please talk about what you know. Mental illness is IMPOSSIBLE to fake, unless you are yourself a trained psychiatrist. A faker won't fool a good psychiatrist for a minute. So au contraire, it's very easy to disprove.
There is an epidemic of mental illnesses, and not only in the USA. The same phenomenon is happening in every divisive, liberal society (like the Northern Europe countries, and mainly Sweden). When identities dissolve, empathy and ethical backbones go, and people can't count on each other because they live in dod-eat-dog societies, their mental health collapse with an astonishing ease.
Cohesive societies like the Latin, Orthodox and other highly centralized countries are much less at risk. They are poorer, but more sane.
Lea: "Mental illness is impossible to fake..."
I'm sure you mean well, but you really need to get a clue. Mental illness is frequently faked. And not just by what are derrided as FSA-types (I worked 4-years as a mental health clinician (a second job while working full-time and in school full-time-- if anyone is nuts it's me!), but elsewhere, such as where it can be used as a mitigating factor in criminal defense or to invoke the threat of ADA to keep a job or receive unemployment compensation.
Personally, I owe much of my education to a man who faked mental illness in order to survive Stalin's henchmen: sometimes it's better to be marginalized politically and to survive to fight another day than in is to be killed.
I don't disagree that we see much legitimate mental illness in our society, but there are many who embrace it as a means of obtaining benefits in order to survive our "capitalist" system.
Earl Slaughter, yes, mental illnesses are frequently faked, but hardly ever with any success.
Like you, I have worked in the mental health sector, and both my parents have been mental health practitioners all their lives. I have seen guys I would have sworn were batshit crazy, the psychiatrist laughing to himself and sending them to the worst ward of the psychiatric facility, to scare them and make them come back to their senses. For some reason, after some hours in the company of very deteriorated psychotics (who can be truly frightening), they claimed they were right as rain.
In other cases, when the story was more painful (like for instance, that beaten woman who faked mental illness not to have to go back to her place), they simply talked the people into changing whatever situation they were trying to escape.
Conversely, I also tried to spot cases where sane people were locked up by mistake or through wrong diagnoses. I coud never spot one. Even if they looked sane enough to me at first sight, they always turned out to have something deeply wrong with themselves. I gained a healthy respect for the competence of psychiatrists.
Of course, I'm talking about the ones who work with real mental cases in real psych wards, not those who medicate children because they're bribed for it. These are scum and the shame of the profession.
PS: Your mentor must have been trained to fake mental illness. You do not improvise something like that, you must know precisely what you're doing. The vast majority of the fakers don't have a clue about real mental illness symptoms.
Our "fakers" in USA would mostly be weeded-out by an involuntary stay, 24/7, with people who really needed to be in a locked-down facility.
What the beef is here, it's that you can build a case for SSD by dropping-in on a crisis center and (with crocodile-tears) say that you anxious, depressed and have HAD thoughts of hurting yourself. "HAD" is important: it means the difference between getting immediately locked-up or having an appointment scheduled for you with the shrink. "Affect" and "appearance" are also important, as you noted.
Psychitrists aren't mind-readers, and here in USA if they make the wrong call they'll make the headlines AND get sued. Unlike medical practioners, it's more difficult for them to bury their mistakes. Any doubt, refer to treatment. And that's to qualify for SSD.
For LEO (Law Enforcement Officers), how hard is it to start "pillowing" (rubbing your fingers together as if experincing the side-effects of certain psychotropic meds that are making their way back into fashion) and faking the response to internal stimuli?
So if my mentor stuck his finger in his bunghole and smeared shit across his face, they'd see right through his act?
Perhaps mental illness was a poor choice of words. SS pays for mental disorders a list of which could include:
I saw a huge difference between the population of voluntary commitments and the court-ordered patients (go figure).
The door to this mess was opened in the early 80s when funding was drastically cut at the federal level in favor of "community care": one was less likely to scam the system prior to then because of the real threat of being locked-up with honest-to-god, for-real, SERIOUSLY FUCKING CRAZY PEOPLE... but there were the ones who were crazy, who needed the help and a safe, highly-structured environment that were dumped on families that did not have the means to provide care, with or without SSD. Often these unfortunate mentally-disabled individuals ended up on our streets, in our jails and prisons, or dead. And the family members who could not help them, guilt-ridden and helpless.
I say, bring back the looney-bin-- it's good for everybody.
@0b1knob
Yes, that's something else... here, we enter the realm of phony psychiatry tailored to push medications. It would be interesting to know how many cases are just light ADHD (primarily created in children by TV, video games and a lack of understandable points of reference, BTW. It should never be medicated), social anxiety, drug addiction or vague memory losses and how many are true mental burdens like chronic insomnia, OCD, panick attacks, PTSD, dysthymia or depressions. You don't fake any of the latter, not even panick attacks or OCD because there are other symptoms correlated with them. Unless, of course, the psychiatrist is paid to push his dope and will go along with the fraud...
Hallucinations (schizophrenia), Asperger's Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder are real badass psychotic states.
I'm sure someone has the real statistics, but who?
@Earl Slaughter, I agree full-heartedly on the re-opening of the loony bins, mainly for those who need the help and safety of that environment.
I am European. Thankfully, we still have them.
I'll call out your bullshit on that. Until 1974 homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder. Psychiatry defines mental illnesses as anything opposed to the status quo of the day - with Libertarians now squarely in the target sights.
By definition everybody running our banks, government's and federal reserve have a mental illness callled psychopathy.
"Psychiatry defines mental illnesses as anything opposed to the status quo of the day"
Don't be a jerk and only talk about what you know, alright?
http://www.nami.org/factsheets/mentalillness_factsheet.pdf
Hey Lea, bit of a warning: while we all are scared of the witch that lives on the outskirts of town by the edge of the woods, some believe it to be real.
So you've entered a fight as to what is real and to whom. The "rabbit-hole."
"Mental illness" has been used to serve various interests, greater-political, or personal. In part. this article mentions the FSA assholes, and I agree that they are like leaches ora cancer upon upon the body-politic.
"Mental illness" can also be used subjectively. to denigrate or deride, without basis other than subjected mental illness alone. In USA, people who disagree with the two-party system or MSM lies are deemed "conspiracy-theorists," "kooks," or "crazy," just like as in the Soviet Union. So to know "crazy" doesn't necessarily involve a knowledge of DSM IV/V.
Think in context: the Europe that you know and experience is not the USA.
"Think in context: the Europe that you know and experience is not the USA."
Earl Slaughter, I agree with what everything you say, and it's a relief speaking with somebody who knows what he's talking about like you. Yes, apparently in the US, it turns out mental illness has become more politics or agendas than health or science. Unfortunately...
The trend seems to have started somewhere back in the seventies, when self-serving agendas began to invade social sciences - not only in the USA, BTW. In Europe, obvious frauds like France's Jacques Lacan or Gilles Deleuze (who was not even a psychologist or psychiatrist) were made into psychology/psychiatry stars only because of their liberal left-wing leaning.
"In USA, people who disagree with the two-party system or MSM lies are deemed "conspiracy-theorists," "kooks," or "crazy,"
I agree. Nevertheless, Earl, as a foreign observer, I can tell you the amount of real nutty conspiracy theories you encounter on the American forums is quite astonishing. The amount of people talking about "chemtrails", "Zio-nazis", "fluoride" or "Illuminati" exceeds by far anything you can see in Europe.
I thought maybe it was the result of decades of Cold War and fearmongering - scores of people jumping at their own shadow or seeing dark plots everywhere. Not that there aren't any dark plots, mind you, but there is such a thing as evidence, which too many don't seem to require (when in my opinion, there are enough proven sinister plots as it is not to have to manufacture phantom bogeymen on top).
Furthermore, the paranoid vision seems to be pushed by TPTB, who are never against anything that can pit people against each other or breed hatred and suspicion. All in all, it can truly be crazy-making. That, and their constant contradictions. And here, we're talking about both the USA and the EU since it really took hold (around 2000 or a bit before, when we started having showers of idiotic regulations).
And thank you for the exchange, Earl. It's a pleasure.
Completely true.
It is also completely true that there's an epidemic of chronic long-term chemical abuse that stresses, damages and atrophies the capacity to focus, listen, think and respond, even marginally adequately to others and to daily challenges and requirements.
The result is crazy behavior that is not a put on, it is quite real and a very serious problem.
It's also reversible and recoverable, for most people.
Lazy fraudulent liars are a constant, a given, its called human nature, humans are a check on Socialism, and why it never works, they always cheat given their large brains constantly running cost benefit analysis.
Damn humans always game "the system", why can't they just "donate taxes" all their lives and just die leaving a state surplus?
Don't these people know they're livestock and their purpose is to turn a profit for the state, not enjoy their lives?
Cmon people suck it up!
'
"Jennering" should become the CATCHPHRASE for what the ZWO has worked 24/7 to inflict on the American white male for the last century... Or is it "Gendering", I'm not sure...
I think the Jennering would be taxpayer funded if I was incarcerated
So would your dental work,
but you might not like the neighbors.
What does the author mean by the "fruitcakes in Washington"?
His name was Barney Frank.
Currently it's Blobama.
The forced illusion of this new demonically-manufactured so-called "Reality" that apparently, we now live in....
DSM: Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Step right up folks...failure to conform
A new disorder for every order you don't obey. May they burn in hell, every sell-out psychologist.
You have to be a real sick fuck to put a child on permanent-neural-system-altering drugs.
Yep diagnose and medicate kids and anyone else not fitting conveniently within the 'system'. Meanwhile sociopaths climb to the highest rungs of the banker & technocrat ladders and are so venerated for their sanity they enjoy perks like getting to fly in their private planes to Davos for a dose of mentally healthy group think.
And did you know now a days a person can be a homosexual without being a mental defective?
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/faculty_sites/rainbow/html/facts_mental_he...
Just sayin............
But I must say that I thank my few remaining lucky stars that ritalin was not available when I was growing up.
http://www.drugfreeworld.org/drugfacts/ritalin.html
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/01/30/anoka-hennepin-schools-may-star...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/she-fought-for-patients-rights-then-...
Arnold,
Freud's position - that kept changing, by the way, as normally happens with all pioneers, who by essence gradually discover more and more - is misrepresented beyond recognition in the first article you provide, so I didn't read bother the rest.
And that passes for knowledge in America?????
Good Lord.
Just sayin....................
You also would be a real sick fuck if you brought a child into this world today, always remember no child asks to be born.
To ODD, I say FUCK YOU!
I've hated government since I was 17 and understood what it was all about, control. I've functioned just fine for the 30+ years in the interim. With no thanks going to government which seems to be the answer to a whole lot of STUPID questions.
I will not be controlled, whether by unconstitutional laws or inane psychological rulings. If ODD is real, then it's been going on since man evolved from lower form. Which is to say, normal in wishing to be free and unrestrained. Which then leads anyone to the conclusion that it's a BULLSHIT made up diagnosis.
back in the 70's I knew of druggies who would go to their SS disability hearing without bathing for months beforehand with excrement smeared on their clothes. they would sometimes masturbate and urinate in their pants, etc.
the idea was, once one got on SS disability it is a free ride for the rest of ones life, unencumbered to ever have to work again.
...unencumbered to ever have to work again.
So, it's just like being a banker, then?
It's all part of the integration Winston
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All of this financial chicanery has become insane, as have most of the mainstream public and modern cultures across the planet. However, I wouldn't trust anything the Heritage foundation puts out as their agenda always will overshadow any facts.
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Who are these people and what have they done to my country I have been asking for 5 years and sometimes I wonder am I the Zombie lmao. Oops give me SSI
I think this has more to do with the economy. As people exhausted their unemployment benefits and still couldn't find a job, they applied for disability. But if you can't prove a physical disability, they went for mental. This article is bullshit.
bingo
I am certain that if we are honest with ourselves that we could all be mentally defective enough to fool people.
For instance sociopathy is common in the banking and equity marketing industry s, but somewhat unrecognized by most.
In that case, what do the people who have been long term unemployed and who cannot find a job even though willing to work supposed to do in this society as it is currently set up? What's your solution? I await your answer...
Amnesty. So you can stay on unemployment/disability benefits, eating cheetos and watching the game.
So, you're one of those guys who sits at the kids table when the adults enter the room? No problem, many here are there with you.
Don't see too many adults. Just children complaining about their parents.
I read your original question. The real question is. What did they not do, when they could have done something about it? I'm afraid in our financially broken banana-society without morals, the choice train already left.
Amazing - paying people to diagnose and treat other people with mental illness causes more mental illness to be diagnosed! Who would have guessed!
Can't wait to see the numbers once all that mental health stuff hidden in Obamacare kicks in!
Paying taxes into a system that pays for all this is a mental disease.
Wise up, folks. Start a bank.
And don't forget to change your name to Jeremiah Moses Abraham, or some variation thereof.
easiest to rob a bank if you own it.....Mr Black
and some very clever people
Dude, I felt so guilty I had to take a job after 20 years of living on another planet.
Cool that headset, do they have that in the Apple store?
In ye olde days, mental patients were sent to asylums - horrible conditions - but no one would even consider 'faking it'.
Today, if you are a mental patient you get to stay home, play games on your free iPhone, collect a government check, and go see a counselor once or twice a month. The thing that is disabled is 'work ethic'.
you would be crazy , NOT to apply for disabilty !!
Mr. Bonner's terminology is incorrect. The "mental defectives" live off the rest of us ("taxpayers"). WE are the "zombies." The "mental defectives" are the ones who've actually figured out the system.
heritage foundation - lulz
go blow a banker
The fact that I spent a year in a clinical psychology doctoral program before deciding against the field, getting an MBA in finance, having a 20 year financial career which led, you guessed it, to a layoff just as I approached peak earning years the very month the financial crisis started which culminated, after many years of unemployment, in learning, at age 50, to be a day trader, makes me eminently qualified to comment on this article ... but, alas, as I’m busy examining Interactive Brokers groovy new chart indicators, which all suggest “Maybe Moar, Maybe Less”, I’ll instead state my main reason for posting in this thread, before the overly-caffeinated preceding paragraph got in the way:
Love the way the author was able to find Paul Krugman’s middle-school yearbook picture.
+1000 serious laugh points
“One in three, or 35.2%, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA)."
The first thing to understand about any, and all, government released numbers, stats, is that they aren't real. The numbers are manufactured, or massaged (Winston Smith stats), to support, or not support, an agenda that, like for all governments, is about money, power, and division.
As many here at ZH know, the DC US' stat releases are so shaped, and contrived, to agenda that they are laughable. So I am sure that these SSA stats are no different?
Assuming that the SSA's stats above are not real, and they aren't, but manufactured, or at least "massaged" , to fit an agenda, what is that agenda?
Could it be that it is just another ruse, backdoor, to get our weapons? Classify, say 35% of those on SS, as having a "mental disorder," then tie that in with "limiting firearm ownership for those with mental issues," and voila, a whole lot of people disarmed.
Then there is the question of definition--who defines, and what is the definition? What is a "mental disorder" anyways? Could be anything, and everything.
And what is a SS recipient to do when they force them to surrender their firearms? They won't be able to resist because they are dependent on the very same criminals for their monthly sustenance--a slave.
The banksters need to repay us.
"They lie about everything. Why would they lie about this?!"
"And what is a SS recipient to do when they force them to surrender their firearms?"
Donate them to friends.
You do have friends, don't you?
Oh, please sit back down, we still have forty two minutes left in your session.
"Who better to understand what is going on in the financial world than a crazy person?"
One does not need to be "crazy" to understand what is really going on in the so called "financial world."
I can summerize it with one three word phase: Theft and plunder.
It is nothing more than a massive ponzi scheme having a miriad of victims here, in the American country, and billions more overseas.
The banksters need to repay us.
"How can Social Security’s honest pension fund participants expect to get almost $10 trillion more than they put in?"
Apples and oranges.
I put in a dollar (apple) that bought a gallon of milk, and SS pays me back a dollar (orange) which buys a quart of milk. So I'm not the one stealing from SS. The ones stealing from SS are the ones who created so many thin-air dollars that those thin-air dollars watered down the honest (apple)(gallon-of-milk) dollar that I put in so that now it is only an (orange)(quart-of-milk) dollar. The ones who created the thin-air dollars are the Fed member banks, who voted to have the Fed create the thin-air dollars and "loan them" at next-to-zero interest rates (in effect, "give them") to themselves. And they're still doing that.
When the worship of items over the worship of humans exist mental disease will exist. It will continue to exist till worship of items ceases to exist
Totally wrong.
Worshiping of any sort is insane and one of mankind's most dangerous flaws.
i know i am crazy, i don't need anyone to
tell me that. i know i have paid into s.s.
for 35, some odd, years and have received
nothing in return but the contempt of a
certain crazy and elderly neighbor who has
been collecting on some contribution they
must have made years ago.
so what? i will never live long enough
to get my money back but i am determined to
live long enough to complete my mission/s,
that is what.
.
eating the next generation is a ghastly
approach to public policy and continuance
of a debt slave based monetary system designed
by the count Dracula and friends.
Quote from bill bonner article:
Bonner equates disabled with crazy ? There are many very intelligent people who are disabled, far more intelligent than offensive Bonner.
What you selling Bonner ?
Like all things in governmnet, Social Security is theft, tax, backed by a lie--just another one of their rackets.
Here is treasonous war-criminal Bush Jr. visiting the SSA's "lock-box" of paper receipts of DC US bonds "owned."
http://www.justfacts.com/images/socialsecurity/gwb.jpg
A big hearty LOL (BHLOL)
The banksters need to repay us.
"The DC US is so broke... HOW BROKE ARE THEY? ...they had to borrow from themselves."
The heinous pharmaceutical marketing scheme of drugging kids, with bogus ADHD diagnoses for those who don't fit the standard teaching models and get bored, for the last twenty years has produced a lot of young adults who are on multiple medications. The side effects of the "stimulants" (speed) that their developing brains were exposed to leave them depressed and anxious, so antidepressants and antipsychotics (dangerous drugs with horrible side effects, with harmless sounding names like "Abilify") are added to the cocktail. Customers for life, who are mentally unstable and in many cases unable to ever feel normal again.
Its pretty tragic what desperate, uninformed parents who trust doctors will do to get by. Many of them believe the only chance their kid will have to participate in the workforce is by making their brains "behave" so they can get the grades they need to compete.:
"Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement."
http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/87177:us-kids-represent-p...
When the programs stop paying out the people will have reason to stop paying in.
I wonder if the bottom half realize that by being officially labeled mentally defective, they have lost their right to own a firearm? There is however a silver lining to this. Those deemed mentally defective would have an automatic leg up on the McNaughton Defense should they slip over the edge and start acting out due to their zombie status.
SS Disability payments aren't huge BUT they are often the difference between starving or not in some areas.
'Crazy money' is pretty common in dirt poor places like Appalachia and has taken the place of welfare which has become increasingly restricted and harder to get. Poor people aren't stupid. Even those that may actually have had moral reservations see how corporations and the wealthy are gaming government so they figure 'why not me?' If the choice is going hungry or being 'crazy'...... of course you've also go those that got black lung or are just worn out after working damn hard all their lives who are too young for 'retirement' - not that they have any pensions waiting - view disability as a way o get to 65.
'Disability' fraud is far more prevalent - and EXPENSIVE - in public sector employees. The LIRR scandal where more than half the retirees were collecting disability on top of regular retirement and NYC police who were faking disability claims have been in the news - among others. THOSE people are getting FAR more than the minimal payments being paid for SS disability.
Reality is - no matter what you do to 'help' people in real need, others will find a way to abuse it. And these days damn near everybody thinks it's fine to game the system because 'everybody else' is.