This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 5th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There was a federal entitlement program in serious trouble so much so that it threatens to run out of money in the next few years.

It's SSDI Social Security Disability Insurance.

And according to Jagadish Goklay, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the program

leads many people into a dependency that's very difficult to escape.

We have seen that the program has experienced a huge increase in applications.

Some of those increases are associated with the recent recession.

People when they are unemployed and have no avenues to support themselves turn to disability in the hope that they can qualify and then remain on disability.

Once you're on disability, the chances that you will go back to the labor force are minimal.

And very few people actually revert back to the labor force because if you do so, you lose your disability benefits.

If you work more than a certain amount, earn more than a certain amount, then disability benefits are eliminated. You no longer qualify.

So because it takes such a long time to qualify for disability benefits in the first place,

it takes the average time before your eligibility will be decided can take up to 500 days, so almost two years.

Such a long waiting period with such a long

an arduous applications process

and a time when you cannot work because essentially you got to prove to the disability

adjudicators that you're unable to work.

Well, you wouldn't be able to prove that if you actually worked.

So for those, for that period you to stay off jobs, you have no income,

you're draining your savings, you're also losing your skills,

you're also losing your

...