Where America’s Social Security benefits go, in four maps

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Most Social Security recipients – including retired or disabled workers, plus their spouses and children, and in some cases their parents – receive benefits through the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability (OASDI) program. Seth Kadish of Vizual Statistix created the maps below, which break down how OASDI funds are distributed. The maps show, clockwise from the top left, the percentage of a county’s population that receives OASDI benefits; the percentage of OASDI beneficiaries who are retired, rather than disabled; the areas where payments to men most greatly outweigh those given to women; and the average monthly OASDI payment, in hundreds of dollars.

Beyond revealing where America’s retirees live (a lot are in Florida and the Southwest, unsurprisingly), the maps say some interesting things about welfare programs and employment. The upper-right hand map, for example, shows a large white swathe stretching across the southeastern US, indicating these states have a large proportion of disabled workers. The states with the highest percentage of people age 18-64 on disability in the U.S. are West Virginia (where the number is nearly 1 in 10), Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Maine, Tennessee, South Carolina and Missouri.

The number of former workers on disability has increased a lot in recently decades, roughly doubling between 1995 and 2010. That’s in part because Americans are getting older – older workers have more health issues. But it’s also due to efforts by states, often in cooperation with private companies, to move people off of unemployment benefits, which states need to pay for, and onto disability, which is a federal program. Some argue that disability has become a de facto welfare program, especially for low-income people without a lot of education or job training.

Not only do disabled workers receive federal dollars without showing up on welfare rolls, they also are not officially counted as unemployed. Though the vast majority of people on disability do not work, they are not technically part of the labor force, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics excludes them from the unemployed.

"Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program," MIT economist David Autor told NPR.