This expose in the New York Times is absolutely shocking.  Long Island Rail Road allows workers to retire on pension after age 50 with 20 years of service.  Work rules allow some of them to get 4 days pay for 1 days work.  Shocking, right?  No, huh.  Well then, how about this.

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.

In good years, the percentage goes down to 94.

It’s pretty easy, apparently.  All you need is an MRI and a larcenous dream.  For you youngsters out there, allow me to explain.  After age 50, your back looks like crap on an MRI.  There are these things called disks between the vertebrae, and they bulge, disintegrate and herniate.  It happens to all of us.  Trust me, I know.  And I’ve never done an honest days labor in my life.

So retire at 50, get an MRI showing a bulging disk, and go on disability.  What a great life!

During the workweek, it is not uncommon to find retired L.I.R.R. employees, sometimes dozens of them, golfing there. A few even walk the course. Yet this is not your typical retiree outing.

These golfers are considered disabled. At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments — a sum roughly equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers.

If it makes you feel better, not all of them play very well.  Some have handicaps in the 90s.  I mean, how much more disabled could you want?

This is an outstanding piece of investigative reporting for anyone who wonders why the LIRR tickets cost so much or where their tax dollars are going.

H/T Kathleen, who’s never been on an LIRR train in her life.