I picked up a computer game on eBay (probably my first such purchase in a year) and I’m going to dive into it soon. But first, I wanted to point out a Cornell study that shows that the employment rate for people with disabilities actually dropped a couple points in recent years. Not great news for those of us in the world of disability policy. The systemic barriers that prevent people with disabilities from working are still multitude, and the assumption that people with disabilities can’t work is one that remains deeply ingrained in our culture. I wish I knew the catalysts that will eventually reverse this trend. Maybe it will be the aging of the boomer generation. Maybe it will be some unforeseen technological leap. But the policies that currently exist aren’t working. To be successfully employed, people with disabilities need a comprehensive range of supports that include health care, transportation, personal assistance, training, housing, and so on. Right now, we aren’t doing a terribly good job of delivering those supports in one comprehensive, coordinated package. We make it really difficult for people to navigate and understand the services that are available, so it should be no surprise that most people simply give up and choose the easier, more secure option of remaining unemployed.
I think part of the problem can be traced to the idea popularized by Ronald Reagan that government is bad. There are things that only government can do, of course; the private sector can’t maintain a standing army, or maintain a transportation ifrastructure, or provide the “comprehensive range of supports that include health care, transportation, personal assistance, training, housing, and so on”. Unfortunately government has been so succesfully demonized that a substantial percentage of the electorate has come to believe that if a service cannot be provided by the private sector, it shouldn’t be provided at all.
Add to this the fact that cutting federal taxes has resulted in the elimination of federal support for many of these things, as well as increases in state and local taxes, and the inability of state and local government to provide these things in a cost effective way (or at all) and what you have is what we have. What we have here is a brutal system where basic necessities have been crowed out off the margins for a substantial minority. Not just the disabled, either. Poor people, old people– there are quite a few constituancies that are being screwed this way.
The solution is a model like that in Western Europe. I don’t see that happening here any time soon.