Chart of the day

As Chana Joffe-Walt explains,

Part of Clinton’s welfare reform plan pushed states to get people on welfare into jobs, partly by making states pay a much larger share of welfare costs. The incentive seemed to work; the welfare rolls shrank. But not everyone who left welfare went to work.

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability.

Chart of the day

According to Chana Joffe-Walt,

There used to be a lot of jobs that you could do with just a high school degree, and that paid enough to be considered middle class. I knew, of course, that those have been disappearing for decades. What surprised me was what has been happening to many of the people who lost those jobs: They’ve been going on disability.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Optimism of the will

Tom Shakespeare (Research Fellow at Newcastle University and author of Genetics Politics: from Eugenics to Genome and The Sexual Politics of Disability) recently traveled [ht: ms] to visit the childhood home of one of his disability heroes, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci:

My friend and I drove through the stunning rocky landscape of Sardinia to Ghilarza, the small country town where Gramsci spent his childhood. In the Casa Gramsci, there were photographs, letters, even the stone dumbbells which he made to build up his strength, and finally his death mask.

To see it all, I had to climb out of my wheelchair and crawl up the stairs, but that seemed the least I could do in honour of a man who had suffered so much. A hero to the Left, Gramsci has rarely been celebrated as a disabled role model, or a hero to the disability community. I found it very moving to see the relics of his life, just as I have always been inspired by the motto he chose: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”.