because all these people are putting a strain financially on the system as the trust fund goes broke the disability insurance trust fund as it is meant to go broke in two thousand and sixteen what's going to happen is a lot of people are truly disabled are going to lose a significant amount of benefits because of these less disabled or undecidable people who are taking advantage of the system so then can we confederate turning into a welfare program. it defacto appears to have replaced the traditional welfare that was reformed in one thousand nine hundred six so when bill clinton signed the welfare reform law over the welfare reform bill into law in one thousand nine hundred six people thought that was going to end welfare as we know it or reform welfare what seems to have happened is a lot of people have been shifted their use. of welfare programs through the disability insurance system or here is what stephen guy's the chief actuary had to say about how to fix the program. the forty trajectory cannot be sustained one not only cannot be but it will be i mean that's that's pretty clear and the projections we

and in one thousand nine hundred four the disability insurance trust fund was just one year away from being depleted and at that time congress enacted every allocation of the payroll tax but they didn't increase overall tax aid is a federal restructuring required to fix the disability program. there's no doubt that congress has to step in here and restructure the program but the most important thing. to do is rein in some of these loose eligibility requirements or eligibility standards that have allowed a lot of non-disabled people to get on the program you might not necessarily want to throw existing people off the rolls because that's just going to be politically very challenging but at least you want to tie it up for future and role is to make sure that the people who are on the program in the future are truly disabled and there are a lot of other reforms you can do to make sure that the legal process by which we get people out of the rolls is standardise so what happens now is through that one thousand nine hundred four law i was mentioning the federal government the social securi

various trust funds that we report on, social security he faces the largest actuarial shortfall and the most immediate financial challenge. rejectedlenge is the insolvency of the disability insuranceund. current projections, it will be depleted in 2016, three years away. there is a tendency -- and all of us do this, trustees as well, to talk about the combined finances. but each trust funds separately has to maintain solvency in order to avoid an interruption of benefit payments. under current projections, we will only have enough resources in 2016 to pay 80% of schedule disability payments. entiretyback to the of the social security program as a whole, the long-term imbalance we now project in the combined trust funds equals 2.72% of the tax base in worker taxable wages. that may seem like a pretty small number, but bear in mind it is nearly three percent of all the worker wages -- nearly 3% of all worker wages over the next 75 years, a very large sum of money. it is also the largest shortfall the program has faced since the 1980 three reforms. it is longer than the shortfall corrected by those reforms. if we were to enact a social security reform today, we would have to make leg

this is to reallocate some of the tax is going to the retirement side, the survivors trust fund, to the disability insurancerust fund. that is an option that legislators can consider. of course, that option has downsides. it basically means taking revenue away from the retirement portion of social security and putting it into the disability portion. that would make all the sense in the world if the old-age and survivors trust fund was in a better long-term position, but that is not what our numbers show. we show a larger long-term deficit in the old-age and survivors trust fund then we show in the disability trust fund. the reason the disability trust fund is projected to be depleted earlier is because people go on to disability benefits at younger ages, so that wave is hitting the disability system first. if we were to reallocate the taxes, we would take taxes away from the retirement program at the moment people are moving from disability to retirement, and taking it away from the weaker long-term condition. the optimal way of dealing with all this, and the best way, would be for legislators to address th