Scapegoating ALJs

     Jon Dubin and Robert Rains have written an Issue Brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy titled Scapegoating Social Security Disability Claimants (and the Judges Who Evaluate Them) in response to the Richard Pierce hit piece in Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute. Here is one paragraph from the Dubin and Rains piece (footnote omitted):

Policy is often initiated, and sometimes adopted, based on popular misconceptions, partial truths, commonly repeated falsehoods, and isolated anecdotes with unfortunate consequences. Because neither the Pierce proposal’s media-anecdote-driven factual assumptions nor core legal suppositions about the identified problem are well-founded and because the proposed solutions are both misguided and unsound, this initiative, and other similar initiatives, should be non-starters.

     My experience tells me that if there were simple solutions that would produce consistent decision-making  on Social Security disability claims, we would long since have achieved those solutions. The people administering the Social Security disability programs, like the rest of us, occasionally do stupid things but they are far from stupid and they have had decades to study the problem. Disability determination has been studied many, many times over the years by outsiders and many of them spent far more time on it than Pierce. The only people who think there are easy solutions are people like Pierce, who have only studied the problems superficially.  I think the worst label one can put on a policy recommendation is "naive" and naive is the kindest thing I can say about what Pierce has written.