A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Vocational Rehabilitation Program.

TLDR: It is led to the surprising conclusion that from the standpoint of economic efficiency, it may be as desirable to rehabilitate the less productive disabled as the more productive.

Abstract: More than 170,000 disabled persons were rehabilitated through the state-federal vocational rehabilitation program in fiscal 1967. A conservative estimate of their increased lifetime earnings is about $4.7 billion, about $8 for each dollar of the social cost of rehabilitation services. If we discount these future increased earnings at 4 percent, the latter figure falls to a little less than $5. Taxpayers share substantially in these earnings, as the increased taxes paid by the rehabilitants and the reduction in tax-supported payments for their maintenance amount to perhaps as much as 25 percent of the total increase in earnings. Since rehabilitants with the highest earnings at closure also tend to be those with the highest earnings at acceptance and are the most expensive to rehabilitate, we are led to the surprising conclusion that from the standpoint of economic efficiency, it may be as desirable to rehabilitate the less productive disabled as the more productive.