This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 11, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Social securities finances have taken a hit from the current downturn as older marginal workers move into early retirement and the program itself

that is future taxpayers will continue to take hits as long as the recovery remains

sluggish. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jagadish Coakle is author of the new book Social Security,

a fresh look at policy alternatives.

If you can't find a job, then you might try your hand at retiring earlier than you plan to.

But you cannot begin to collect Social Security benefits until you're at least 862

unless there is some extenuating circumstance

that you're a single parent with a child and care

and so on, in which case you can apply for benefits even earlier than 62.

But in that case, people say let me try to see if I can get disability benefits and so I think what's going on as people are applying for disability benefits if they have some chance of

getting on to a disability program that is they are they they can prove

medically that they are disabled in which case you can start collecting benefits early, and when you become 62, you

are ruled into the Social Security program.

So that's one avenue people are trying out right now, which means that the disability program

workload has increased tremendously and the backlog has increased tremendously as it is in the disability

program, the waiting time from your first application through going

through all the different stages of getting approved for the disability program or becoming eligible to the benefits

takes 500 days. Let me repeat that's 500 days since you apply to, on average. That's a long waiting time, but the workload, the backlog was something like 700,000 outstanding disability beneficiary applicants.

So it's a big challenge to the Social Security Disability Program administrators and judges and so on to work through these cases quickly.

And if the unemployment rate doesn't go back down, if the economy doesn't recover quickly, it's quite possible that the compound

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