I Wish There Were More Of These

From the Texarkana Gazette:

The Social Security Administration will present a seminar on work and disability Thursday at the Texarkana Public Library.

The seminar will be from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the library at 600 West Third Street, Texarkana, Texas.

Anyone with questions can contact Lisa McBay, SSA claims representative at 903-792-3818 ext. 231 or by e-mail at lisamcbay@ssa.gov.

It seems to me that policymakers in Washington and Baltimore cannot grasp that work incentives for disabled people do no good unless the public understands how they work. This sort of public outreach effort is desperately needed since the work incentives we have are so complex, but staffing is so short at Social Security offices that there is little of it.

2007 Technical Panel Report

This is definitely the "wonk zone."

The Social Security Advisory Board has finally released a report that it received last year from a technical panel it assembled to review the Social Security Administration's actuarial projections.

The report's "executive summary" needs an executive summary of its own, but as anyone familiar with Social Security's highly regarded actuarial operations would expect, there is no real criticism in the report.

Stats By Congressional District

The Social Security Administration has released a set of statistics by Congressional District.

Social Security On The Campaign Trail

From the Associated Press:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama on Friday called for higher payroll taxes on wage-earners making more than $250,000 annually, a step that would affect the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans.

The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income."

The 6.2 percent payroll tax is now applied to all wages up to $102,000 a year, which covers the entire amount for most Americans. Under Obama's plan, the tax would not apply to wages between that amount and $250,000. But all annual salaries above the quarter-million-dollar amount would be taxed under his plan, Obama said.

Obama also said his rival, John McCain, has indicated in the past he was willing to consider higher payroll taxes.

But Douglas Holz-Eakin, the Republican candidate's senior economic policy adviser, said that as president, McCain would not consider an increase "under any imagineable circumstance." ...

McCain, campaigning Friday in New Jersey, said Obama was misrepresenting his position.

"I will not privatize Social Security," he said. "But I would like for younger workers, younger workers only, to have an opportunity to take a few of their tax dollars, a few of theirs, and maybe put it into an account with their name on it. That's their money."

He told reporters later on his campaign bus: "Private savings accounts have to be voluntary, they have to be only for young people, and they can't be the centerpiece of the argument. We have to solve this problem and not worry about private savings accounts, because even though I support them, I don't think it's central to the issue. Central to the issue is that the system is going broke. Of course I'm not for privatization. But I do think young workers ought to have some options."

Current retirees would not lose any benefits, McCain said.

Fee Payment Stats

The Social Security Administration has released updated figures on payments of fees to attorneys and others for representing Social Security claimants. As I always say upon posting these numbers, the attorney is paid at about the same time as the claimant. When you see that payments of these fees go up or go down, you are seeing payment of benefits to claimants go up or down.

Fee Payments
Month/Year	Volume	Amount
Jan-08	20,559	$75,368,163.45
Feb-08	26,570	$95,228,284.32
Mar-08	23,088	$83,166,027.02
Apr-08	27,296	$98,616,579.78
May-08	29,305	$104,283,373.35

Where You Are

I thought I would share some info from Google Analytics about the locations from which people are logging onto this blog. These figures below are from the past week for the United States. There are a negligible number of hits from outside the United States. The figure given is on the number of visits, rather than the number of page views.

Apparently, 77% of the visitors coming from the ssa.gov domain show Maryland as the location from which they are logging on and 23% show North Carolina. None show any other location, but obviously, people in other states are logging onto this blog from ssa.gov. My impression is that Social Security must have two major internet portals, one in Maryland and one in North Carolina, through which all ssa.gov access to the internet is routed, regardless of where the person accessing the blog may be sitting. The location of this portal is reported rather than the actual location of the user.

And, by the way, I have no way in the world of determining exactly who is reading this blog. Google Analytics gives a lot of information, but it cannot identify any individual.

1.	Maryland	1,491
2.	North Carolina	537
3.	California	131
4.	District of Columbia	127
5.	Missouri	117
6.	(not set)	115
7.	Virginia	114
8.	Illinois	104
9.	Georgia	101
10.	Massachusetts	98
11.	New York	85
12.	Michigan	82
13.	Ohio	80
14.	Florida	77
15.	Texas	75
16.	Pennsylvania	64
17.	Tennessee	55
18.	Washington	54
19.	New Jersey	45
20.	South Carolina	43
21.	Kansas	27
22.	Iowa	24
23.	Oregon	24
24.	Delaware	24
25.	West Virginia	23
26.	Connecticut	22
27.	Alabama	20
28.	Colorado	16
29.	Maine	15
30.	Utah	14
31.	Oklahoma	13
32.	Nevada	13
33.	Wisconsin	12
34.	Minnesota	11
35.	Arkansas	10
36.	Indiana	10
37.	New Mexico	9
38.	Louisiana	8
39.	Kentucky	8
40.	Arizona	7
41.	Vermont	7
42.	New Hampshire	7
43.	Mississippi	7
44.	Rhode Island	5
45.	North Dakota	2
46.	Nebraska	2
47.	Hawaii	1

De Soto Clarifies Remarks

I had earlier posted that Lisa De Soto, Social Security's Deputy Commissioner for the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, said at the conference of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) in Miami on June 5 that Social Security had received an additional 140,000 requests for hearing this year, a statement that if true would be stunning news. The next day I posted a report that I had received through the grapevine that De Soto had misspoken, that she had meant to say that the 140,00 additional cases was over the next few years.

I have now heard that Ms. De Soto has officially asked NOSSCR to notify its members that she misspoke in saying that there were 140,000 additional requests for hearing this year. She meant to say 140,000 additional requests for hearing over the next several years.

NPRM On Evidentiary Standards

As mentioned yesterday, the Social Security Administration has published a Notice of Proposed Rule-Making (NPRM) in the Federal Register that would define the terms "preponderance of the evidence" and "substantial evidence." It appears innocuous to me.