America’s Un-American Culture Of Disabled Workers

Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hit a nerve. Unlike our rugged forebearers, we are weaklings, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States carved out a continent of seemingly endless forests, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges, and scorching hot deserts. Over time, American frontiersmen, settlers, and entrepreneurs forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12-16-hour shifts in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century, over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The Industrial Revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains, and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.

One sometimes must marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.

Image by Grok.

Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different from Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines, and highways so different from Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different from Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber, and the microchip so different from Americans today?

Not based on DNA, they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back little more than one generation, and it seems as if Americans were something from another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen.

In 1970, there were 79 million people working in the United States, supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability. Fast forward five decades, and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024, the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period, however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.

The United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970, fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing, while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing, while over 70% of workers work in the service industry.

Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s, or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed, it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023, that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.

But of course, work is not the only place where one gets hurt—but even that doesn’t explain all the disability. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go, everything seems safer.

Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks, and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens, and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory, towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding, and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book-length warning labels. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

But somehow, in this much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed: The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined. American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%.  That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy? Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working?

No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state.

From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to a quarter of applicants suffering from musculoskeletal injuries—which conveniently enough often cannot be detected by doctors—to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, SSDI is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America today, where in 2022 fully 4.5% of working age Americans were on disability. The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When the government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof, just look at the food stamp program over the same 50-year period. While the population has increased by about 75% since 1970, workers by 100% and disability by 380%, food stamp recipients grew by over 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex,” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 50 years were to be repeated over the next 50, in 2075, the country would have 320 million workers supporting almost 30 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply unsustainable, particularly if the goal is to Make America Great Again.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen, but eventually the numbers stop working. The thing I think Ramaswamy misses is that it was inevitable that the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge would reemerge and shrug. That’s what happened in November. For it to make any difference however, the nanny state will have to be eviscerated, and not just the regulatory part of it. The redistribution apparatus will have to be dismantled, too, and the disability industrial complex is a good place to start.

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com

Most Read


Last 24 Hours

Reza Pahlavi at CPAC? Big mistake
Week Four: No Rest for the Grifters
Democrats Prepare for the Big House
Color Me Confused By The Left’s Unhinged Reaction To Trump
No More Mr. Nice Guy

Last 7 Days

USAID’s Samantha Power: From journalist to global power broker—without accountability
We’re Living through the Biggest Scandal of All Time
Reza Pahlavi at CPAC? Big mistake
Week Four: No Rest for the Grifters
Trump’s Chess Game Is Improving