Yves here. Please circulate this post on the Trumped-up attacks on Social Security.As more proof of what Musk’s and Trump’s priorities are, how many stories have we seen of DOGE finding waste and fraud at the Pentagon, which is a pork machine that has been unable to reconcile its books for over two decades? A favorite clip:
By Nancy J. Altman, president of Social Security Works and chair of the Strengthen Social Security coalition. Originally published at Common Dreams
The only efficiency Elon Musk cares about is how efficiently he can take your money to line his own pockets. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, Musk is coming after your earned Social Security benefits.
President Dwight Eisenhower, Republican and war hero, could have been talking about Musk when he warned in 1954of a handful of “Texas oil millionaires” attempting to abolish Social Security. “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid,” he wrote.
Musk has made no secret of his disdain for our Social Security system. In just the last few weeks, he has used his gigantic platform to spread outrageous lies about Social Security.
Unlike the extremely rich, stupid men to whom Eisenhower was referring, Musk is, unfortunately, not just ignorant. Trump is giving him the power to steal our earned benefits. Musk is drawing on an old playbook of claiming that the government in general, and Social Security in particular, is full of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Then, when he steals your benefits, he will claim that he is simply cutting waste.
Both Musk’s ignorance and his anti-Social Security playbook were on full display Tuesday, when the shadow president talked to reporters in the Oval Office. In trying to convince us that our extremely efficient Social Security system is rife with fraud, he unknowingly proved how economical its administration is, when he asserted, “Just cursory examination of Social Security, and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old.”
No one born 150 years ago is receiving benefits.. The hardworking civil servants at the Social Security Administration are extremely diligent in tracking the deaths of beneficiaries. Social Security spends millions of dollars every year to purchase the automated death data of state vital records agencies.
And Social Security provides a lump sum death benefit, in part to encourage the families of beneficiaries to report their deaths promptly. When beneficiaries die, their benefits are immediately terminated. Eligible survivors, if any, start to receive the benefits their loved ones have earned for them.
It is important to recognize that what Musk and others label “waste” is usually unavoidable because of the way politicians have drafted our laws. For example, Social Security benefits are paid in the month following the month that they are due. That means that if you die at the end of the month and are paid a benefit a few days later, at the start of the next month, that is considered an overpayment—even when the death is quickly reported and the benefits quickly cancelled. The law requires the Social Security Administration to claw back those benefits from the grieving survivors—which it routinely does.
Again, no one born 150 years ago is still receiving benefits. But here is where Musk is showing his ignorance: Let’s take the example of a person who is issued a Social Security card as an infant and dies at age 10, never having received a penny of benefits. Social Security doesn’t waste taxpayer dollars finding that information and cancelling their Social Security number—this would be prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
Moreover, most adults who die leave behind spouses and children, including adult disabled children, who may be eligible for benefits for many years based on the decedent’s earnings record. Therefore, that record may remain active for a very long time. For example, the last person to receive a Civil War pension was a veteran’s disabled daughter, who died less than five years ago—in 2020.
Disturbingly, the reason Musk was able to assert the ignorant claim about 150-year-olds is that he has accessed our personal data. Because Musk has access to the Treasury’s payments system, he has the Social Security numbers of every worker and Social Security beneficiary. He also has our bank account numbers, and other sensitive, private information.
Musk and his minions are reportedly now not just at the Treasury but also at Social Security’s headquarters in Baltimore. That means they may already have access to how much a person has ever earned, at what job, and when, how old they are, their marital status, and more. Musk may also have access to the medical records of every single one of the millions of Americans who have applied for disability benefits. No unelected, unconfirmed ideologue should be anywhere near those records, especially not the wealthiest man in the world, given his numerous conflicts of interest.
What is going on should be obvious. Musk wants to cut off your benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut. But Social Security is incredibly popular, so he can’t be open about his intentions. Instead, he is trying to convince Americans that our Social Security system is overrun with massive fraud. The truth is the opposite.
Less than 1% of Social Security payments are improper. And remember, that already-low percentage includes all the beneficiaries who die immediately before their benefit is due.
Given that these and all other improper payments constitute less than 1% of all payments made, those that are the result of fraud are vanishingly small. This is in sharp contrast to private insurance. Indeed, the American Academy of Actuaries issued a report just last September about private insurance and concluded that “insurance fraud is widespread.”
Ironically, the best way to stop improper payments—including those vanishingly few that result from fraud—is to adequately staff the Social Security Administration. Face-to-face transactions at your local Social Security field office will catch fraudsters. Online transactions generally won’t.
Unfortunately, your local Social Security office will be closing. Musk has instructed the General Services Administration to terminate all federal office leases, including every Social Security office and every post office.
Musk will do whatever it takes to avoid paying his fair share and enrich himself at our expense. He has his eyes on our Social Security. Lies about fraud might shake people’s confidence, but they are unlikely to shake people’s support for Social Security.
His rummaging around in our private information is unprecedented. It is hard to know what he has in mind or how to stop him. But there is one thing we absolutely can stop.
We can stop Congress from cutting our benefits. We must demand that every member of Congress stand up to Musk’s cynical efforts to steal our earned Social Security benefits while giving himself and other billionaires a hefty tax cut.
Every single member of Congress must publicly pledge that they will keep the promises Trump made on the campaign trail. That means not one penny in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Every member of Congress must tell Musk and Trump: Hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
NC has made me a better informed consumer (to paraphrase the old Sym’s slogan for those of us old enough to remember it). I have long ago concluded that the Libertarian project of unwinding the New Deal’s end-game was dismantling Social Security and Medicaire based on some of the excellent linkage and analysis provided. I had assumed that they would do it through the courts, by using a ‘packed’ SCOTUS to declare them effectively unconstitutional. This is way quicker and more ingenious, though no less evil.
Either way, by the time politicians and the populous wake up to what is/has happened it will be too late.
That’s my biggest fear – and the dangling of “DOGE Dividends” and the way people are lapping it up is extremely concerning.
Almost feels like they will cut people checks, cut SS, and then say “welp, we paid you so you agreed to this” not realizing they are taking $5k now in lieu of tens of thousands of dollars during retirement.
The libertarian, or perhaps the neoliberal project of unwinding the New Deal has combined with the globalist project of unwinding democracy through technocracy. It’s an ideology they openly publish. One example is reviewed here:
From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy
An Evolution of Human Polity
“Will no one rid me of this troublesome man?!!”
Where are four Norman Knights just when you need them? I tell ya. . .
Musk himself is an unstable character and is not to be believed in the statements that he comes out with as he will say anything to further his agenda. He has a history of raging or ghosting people that call him out on his lies, even over minor things. This was brought home to me by something that happened several weeks ago. So Musk plays a game called Path of Exile 2 which is OK. But that was not enough. He paid people to play the game under his account to boost his level sky high but players noticed that when he was playing, that it seemed that he did not know how to actually play the game as an experienced person would. So a YouTuber named Asmongold called him out on it as did other players and they had the receipts to prove their claim. Musk got nasty about it and leaked private messages which proved nothing-
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/01/16/elon-musk-vs-asmongold-the-gaming-feud-explained/
The whole thing was petty on Musk’s part but the point is that somebody like this has been entrusted with the digital keys to the kingdom. if he gets nasty about being called out about small things, what will happen when people call him out on his bs with major things like with Social Security. What will he say next? Maybe that Social Security needs to be privatized by a Wall Street consortium to actually make it “efficient.”
As someone with experience in competitive online games, I find this to be hilarious. The richest man on the planet is trying to impress bunch of nerds by pretending to be good at playing some random game. The whole thing is not just petty, but insane.
Capitalism drives people to insanity, their willingness to destroy the earth’s climate in their eagerness to grow richer being an obvious example.
This is worth a listen: it’s Dan Goyal on Substack on the greedy brain.
Reported here earlier is that Musk has a sock-puppet account on TwiX which posts about what a great father he is. This is all so characteristic of (probably malignant) narcissism.
What would be really interesting would be to see a rift engineered between Musk and Trump…
If everybody whose opinion Trump “cares about” in operational reputation-management and percieved-power-maintainance terms were to universally, always, and every single time refer to President Musk and Assistant Vice President Trump and Assistant Vice President Vance every single time those names came up; would that engineer a rift? Would it happen fast enough to matter?
“Stop the Steal” might be a good slogan to repurpose against Musk’s anti-SSS plans. Also posters with a picture of Musk with the universal circle-slash symbol through and/or over it, and the repurposed slogan ” Not My President”.
The DLC Clintobama Democrats share Musk’s goal of destroying Social Security. Can they be publicly embarrassed into pretending they don’t? Can howling mobs of constituents try pressuring their Dem House Reps into introducing legislation specifically exempting Social Security from DOGE’s scope of inquiry and operations? Can AARP agitate for that through its publicity and propaganda organs?
How does Steve Bannon feel about Social Security? Does he support abolishing it out from under the MAGA base? If he opposes it, does he still talk even the least bit to Tucker Carlson? Could he get Tucker Carlson to agitate against abolishing Social Security on his show?
If the older MAGA basemembers get sick , starve and die fast from lack of Social Security; thereby depriving the Republican Party of their votes, would the Republican Party feel concerned about this?
If prominent loudmouth Democrats and Liberal TV show talkers and etc. pretend ( with well-feigned sincerity) in public to welcome the end of Social Security because they have realized that ending Social Security will reduce the Republican vote faster than it reduces the Democratic vote, would that terrorise Republicans into protecting Social Security from President Musk? Would it be worth a try?
( What is the hold the President Musk has over Assistant Vice President Trump? Trump’s deep psychological need for approval and respect from genuine super-billionaires? I read another theory. Trump’s crypto-fakecoin is nominally worth many billions of dollars. Maybe Musk bought several billion worth (( couch cushion change for Musk)) and then told Trump that Musk would sell it all at once to crash Trump’s fake-coin holdings to zero worth unless Trump does exactly what Musk tells him. Does anyone have a better theory?)
I actually caught an article earlier this morning that was quoting a former SS Adminstration employee who said that back about a decade ago the implemented code that automatically ended payments for anyone who reached 114 (or 115) years of age. This means that even if you’re in the system at 150 years of age, no money has been sent to you in a long time.
“…automatically ended payments for anyone who reached 114 (or 115) years of age.”
So, if the automatic cutoff age is 114 and you’re Naomi Whitehead, having turned that age back in September, and the Social Security payments to which you are legitimately entitled, if any, are cut off, what exactly are you supposed to do?
Neoliberalism Rule #2.
Automatic doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be overridden. In the same article the guy mentioned one of the problems the SSA has is when they cut off payments for various reasons to legitimate recipients. I would suspect the upper age limit is to be a last ditch effort to ensure granny isn’t in the freezer while payments are still being collected. There would likely be a way to override it for outliers like Naomi, but that actually means the SSA has confirmed she’s still alive and a valid recipient.
I am on SS and if we still have a physical SS office in my town I don’t know where it is. Our former location disappeared about the same time the system went to electronic sign up.
But re the above, what I didn’t see is an explanation of how exactly Musk is planning to get Congress to do away with SS.
Also on SS, and don’t expect Congress to go along with any plan to do away with the program.
For the benefit of all Americans, it would be educational to find out the facts about SS and its operations.
How many are enrolled, and relative to population cohorts and demographic buckets?
Who isn’t enrolled, and why? Access, awareness, other factors?
What de-duplication processes are in place, along with exception processing to identify and control for items like superannuation, missing data field entries and such?
What are trends in the in-person versus online use of the SS website, and why?
What IT systems are in place, of what vintage, and what skills and qualifications are needed for staff to keep those functioning?
Add plausible questions to help generate more light amidst all the heat surrounding the topic.
I don’t think Musk should be opening his very uncontrolled mouth at all, but you could just as easily assume he is trying to use the popularity of SS to justify DOGE as a defender of the trust fund.
Supposedly the biggest threat to SS was Bill “Reinventing Government” Clinton until Monica and her stained dress came along to spoil his scheme.
re: duplicate numbers. How many duplicate numbers are from people illegally using numbers belonging to others for purposes of employment who can’t get employment without a SSN who aren’t qualified for a SSN. Or for purposes of identity theft?
My son has two different SS numbers. When we reported it, we were told to use one and discard the other, that numbers would never be reissued.
Bravo to you for reporting it. So many might have let it pass as a simple, unimportant and uncorrectable bureaucratic mess up, when in fact keeping a database clean or correct as it’s called is very important, might not have been considered. Correnting the database is very important.
typo:
correnting“correcting” / ;)The Musk/Trump plan does not in any way involve congress, other than relying on its fecklessness.
Musk’s plan is to break SS in such a way as to make it irreparable. To this end he’s hired a bunch of kids smart enough to find a way to do it, but too ignorant to understand the job is evil.
In the end, Trump will throw his arms in the air;
But why would he do that? In the past it was Wall Street coveting the trust fund so they could turn it into investments and boost the stock market. But Musk is already the world’s richest man and Trump isn’t exactly poor himself. Trump may not be a stable genius but he has proven himself politically astute in once again making himself president. Going after SS would be the opposite of that.
I lack mind reading skills but here’s suggesting that what Musk really wants is to play the big shot–just like his boss. And since government employees are by and large majority Democrats an attack on the bureaucracy is hitting the opposition where they are vulnerable. Gingrich started the scorched earth politics. The Dems in recent years have taken it up and now may wish they hadn’t.
Some of us would say that if you are worried about Trump and Musk what is really needed would be a more credible opposition.
I think there is a plausible reason which we shouldn’t ignore.
Musk might actually be primarily, attacking the payment systems themselves, those supporting the status quo.
An important part of the attack is sowing seeds of doubt amounts the populace as to the reliability of those systems.
It also a great coincidence that the DOGEbags have shiny new $ystems to replace what they destroy.
I fear that what we are witnessing is an accelerationist attempt by the rising ‘religionists‘ of the tech flavor*, led by their Hero/God Elon Musk, on the underpinnings of the current seats of power, held by adherents of the waning $Faith.
Musk thinks that “They”, the techbros make the systems that Wall $treet uses to loot the world, so, why not eliminate the middle men and take over operation of the $Money Machine, and become richer, and, he get’s to show his minions that their dream of a tech-utopia is on the move, and coming closer with every swing of the sacred DOGEaxe.
They’re doing Gods work, as they understand it.
*Technology as emerging religion; TECH AGNOSTIC by Greg M. Epstein
Once again: he’s the world’s richest man. Why does he need to be richer?
But as Noonan said, “it would irresponsible not to speculate”?
In any event Turley says the courts are really not likely to stand up to much of this and so far the polls show that the public majority is with Musk.
I think the Dems made a huge mistake by trying to demonize Trump rather than seeing him as the huge egomaniac that he actually is. Beware of what you ask for by trying to conjure it into being. At this point events are likely to simply play out and we’ll see what happens.
As far as “wealth” and “riches” go, it is eventually not about the money, but about the Ego.
As to old adage goes: “Too much is never enough.”
The wealthy and powerful are also super paranoid about losing their wealth and power. One should point out that Musk didn’t hook up with Trump until the Biden admin had made noises about coming after X and curtailing his space business. He was also under threat from the Euro Digital Services Act which Biden was all for (controlling the internet).
Not to mention that the Dems wanted to put Trump in jail too. You can’t pretend that things are suddenly crazy now when they’ve been crazy for quite awhile before this.
“Once again: he’s the world’s richest man. Why does he need to be richer?”
The answer to this would be addiction to money and power. Musk, for at least a decade, has talked about the need for trillionaires in order to make capitalism work for everyone. I assume it’s because he wants to be the first.
Avarice is the only vice that has no natural limit. All isn’t enough to satisfy someone as avaricious as Musk.
Let’s not mix need and greed. Needs have bounds, greed does not. One can not rationalize irrational things. No one needs to go to war against Russia, but supposedly smart people have been doing it repeatedly.
Scroll upwards for comments about his online gaming “episode”. Why would the world’s richest man do petty stuff? As they say, common sense is not that common.
Trump is not Musk’s boss. Musk is Trump’s boss.
It was interesting to see how Trump had to just sit there and endure Musk’s cute little mini-Musk whispering nasty things to Trump right there in President Musk’s ( and Assistant Vice President Trump’s) own press conference.
At this point in time, people who want to have a more credible opposition will have to become the more credible opposition they wish they had.
Such people will have to figure out how to be a fast-moving obstruction able to move as fast as the Man from DOGE.
Why does he need Congress to do it? He can send his script kiddies into the buildings to steal , change and destroy all the relevant code; fire enough Social Security workers that the remainder can’t administer the system, use his growing control ( including hacker backdoors insider-collaborators and internal sabotage capacity) to stop the payments from going out or to divert all the payments through a series of untraceable shells into his companies, etc.
” Congress? I don’t have any Congress. I don’t need no stinkin’ Congress!”
What i expect will happen is the DOGEbags will make a very real, very quick, and (as a true believer) sincere attempt to kill Social Security outright, but Congresss (bipartisan!) and Trump will double cross Musk and “save” the program through privatization.
I don’t want to be right, but I’ll bet that it’s done by Christmas.
The masses mindlessly putting their retirement savings into stock market index funds is a big reason why we had generations of stocks just going up and up and up, damn the fundamentals. Privatizing social security will allow for a final juicing of the stock prices, which will let the insider all sell out their positions and then execute a rug pull on the American public.
Maybe that rug pull would make USA public do something about it. Probably not.
The “Less than 1% of Social Security payments are improper” relies on the IG report from July 2024. The report , from a numbers angle, as stated in the scope and methodology appendix, relies on
“Reviewed SSA’s Agency Financial Reports for Fiscal Years 2016 through 2023”
Which means they are relying on the SSAs own reports.
With my lack of trust in most govt agencies, I’d like to see an independent way of estimating how many payments SHOULD be made. So the report says that the SSA says 1 trillion+ is paid in benefits annually. I wonder if there is an independent estimate of how much should be paid. I shall search for such a study.
The government produces still publicly available financial, demographic and other reports by agencies, general inspectors, and independent auditors. Research organizations , journalists, and others of varying (but not hidden) degrees of neutrality/bias publish reports based their own analysis. This is the public service and private work of thousands of people all levels of expertise and experience, who compile, maintain, and analyze the information. The contention that all of this is somehow suspect because it’s based in large part on information from “the government”; and that investigators and analysts, including the general public, have been too incapable or corrupt to recognize flawed or misleading information is, in my opinion, elitist in the extreme.
Thank you, marym, for this comment.
Yes. Elitist in the extreme.
“should be paid”?!?
What does that even mean? So there’s a second ground truth database somewhere keeping an independent count of all the people who “should” be entitled to SS benefits so you can compare the numbers?
Then besides the practical impossibility of the task, you get to the more human objection of why anyone would go through the massive effort to create an independent estimate . Looking for errors in processing? Or questioning who should be getting benefits?
Or more probably, expropriating the funds for their own private benefit.
I suppose one could draw a sample of disbursements, trace through all the authorizations, and derive sample statistics regarding the “correctness” of the disbursements. Isn’t that how audits typically get done?
Why is going after SS a priority, and not auditing the Pentagram and the CIA, for starters, where the waste actually kills people?
Because those will fight back. Beating up someone in a wheelchair is much easier.
It’s egregious that they are promising taxpayers 20% of what they save in cutting programs and agencies, only 20% for all the services and entitlements they lose. They have plans to use 80% for other purposes.
I tell you, this is state capture. They have taken the country away from the people. Plain as day. We are living under an occupying force.
I tried to explain all of this to a MAGA coworker a week ago. Ended with a desperate plea that he rewatch George Carlin’s “it’s a big club and you aint’ in it” skit wherein he explains how they’re coming for your social security, sooner or later. That elicited a chuckle, he is a big Carlin fan, but it’s hopeless. He believes Elon is a civic minded genius and millions of illegals and relatives of dead people are defrauding SSI because he wants to believe these things.
No differently than how the US leadership thinks China wants to be the warmongering sole superpower, or how Zionists think the Palestinians would put the boot on their necks, given alternative circumstances, I too am guilty of projecting my own thinking onto others. I serially assume that other people also want to see the world as it actually is, and are persuadable by good evidence. I am the one who is mistaken.
Of course Carlin called it years ago, “they don’t give a f**k about you, at all!”
I know a couple of people exactly like your coworker. Educated, and otherwise intelligent, they are emotionally manipulated to turn a blind eye to the obvious corruption. It is not about intellect, it is about emotional vulnerability and a desperate need to believe that some political savior will make things better.
What will it take to shake the conditioned, delusional, insouciant masses out of their wishful thinking and fantasy world? Even if they stole the rest of our SS and other public resources WE have paid for, the faithful would make more excuses, and still believe in the lies. Like medieval peasants, we are supposed to bow down and worship oligarchs (neo-aristocracy) because they have a divine right to rule over us lowlifes, and they know best. No critical thinking is allowed here.
Politics is like religion: it relies on suspension of reason, and taking everything on “faith”. However, the facts are clear. We live in an institutionally corrupt, dysfunctional and increasingly dystopian country. Our leaders are kakistocrat-kleptocrats with the ugly face of oligarchy (Musk poster boy) front and center.
The DT2 regime will just expedite the imperial decay that is already firmly in motion.
This clown says that he takes Ketamine “…once every other week or something like that.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/tech/elon-musk-ketamine-use-don-lemon-interview/index.html
Ketamine is a dissociative drug derived from Phencyclidine aka PCP or “Angel Dust.” I’m old enough to recall school friends who were institutionalized circa 1970 due to psychosis induced by “Peace Weed” as it was called. A decade later in my professional capacity I watched the epidemic of psychic carnage and random violence that PCP (or “Blast”) caused among young Chicanos in East San Jose California.
To the user I’m sure that Ketamine feels wonderful, but dissociatives aren’t “nice” drugs, especially when taken frequently. They’re a terrific way to tamp-down your empathy and “fry” your brain. Musk is a menace.
Interesting. But even if the Chief Oligarch was stone cold sober, it wouldn’t make any difference. They are drunk on near-absolute power, and surrounded by sycophants. The way I see it, all oligarchs are mentally ill: they are dishonest, callous, sadistic sociopaths.
A term I learned from reading Michael Hudson’s The Collapse of Antiquity: pleonexia (addiction to wealth accumulation and unbridled greed) A term the ancient Greeks used is still apt.
So he confesses to abusing drugs (the establishment narrative) and yet is allowed to interact with federal employees routinely. Make Musk take a drug test like all the other peons have to, and treat him the same as when a peon fails a test .
Ah, but just like the late Matthew Perry, Elon’s got a prescription from, “an actual, real doctor” so it’s all good!
Prescription psychopathy. How useful for an oligarch!
an aside: Musk’s team is harvesting a lot of personal data in govt databases. Is this a stealth effort to prepare for the implementation of the DoD’s Zero Trust initiative? Zero Trust sounds like the old Total Information Awareness proposal the voters roundly rejected the first time around. The idea, imo, is to put every US individual’s entire online and data life into a single giant govt database instead of multiple unrelated databases for monitoring and pre-crime type purposes. pdf doc:
Department of Defense (DoD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture Version 2.0July 2022Prepared by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and National Security Agency (NSA) Zero Trust Engineering Team
https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/Library/(U)ZT_RA_v2.0(U)_Sep22.pdf
See also the Wiley publication
Cybersecurity First Principles: A Reboot of Strategy and Tactics
Rick Howard
ISBN: 978-1-394-17309-9
April 2023
https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/Cybersecurity+First+Principles%3A+A+Reboot+of+Strategy+and+Tactics-p-9781394173099
Both publications came out during the B admin.
One small example: closing all SS offices in communities will drive everyone to interact with SS online. Is that the real reason why SS offices are being threatened with closure? Nothing to do with cost savings. / ?
The online only move has already begun. An acquaintance I know has been going through the hoops to start receiving his Social Security. He went to our local social Security Office last November and was given an appointment for a telephone only “interview” with a Social Security operative for February of this year. Why such a wait? The “official” reason given was understaffing.
I am seriously waiting for the entirety of the public facing government systems to be turned over to AIs.
I’m going to ask our daughter who works for a school system in Louisiana if she has yet heard this new excuse from any of her students: “The DOGE ate my homework! Honest!”
Stay safe.
Musk is a defense contractor.
The intent is to replace the IRS with the External Revenue Service, implying funding SS with tariffs.
My guess is privatizing SS management, claiming the cost savings of AI versus the old fashioned COBOL. As well as converting Treasuries into Crypto.
Unless they expect to offload SS to the individual States.
I’m surprised that Musk has not mentioned the recently (01/05/25) repealed Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). The WEP reduced SS payments to those covered by another pension system and having put into SS for less than 30 years. This was repealed under the SS Fairness Act passed by congress in 2023. It affects roughly 2 million folks that qualify for a non-covered pension due to another job (police, teachers, firefighters) that may have put into SS at some point but for less than 30 years and more than 10 years. The Cato Institute which is pushing to re-institute the WEP estimates it will cost $196 billion over the next 10 years. The SSA is charged with determining how to implement the revision of SS payments for WEP impacted people and any backpay for 2024. My guess is that the reduction in SSA staff will slow down the implementation of this to a crawl. For the record I’m one of the 2 million that will receive and extra $300/month if this does get implemented.
I’m surprised by the the 30-years span issue since one needs 40 quarters of SS pay-ins to qualify for SS pension. (1 quarter is one forth of a year x 40 years = 10 years.) A pension earned for only 10-years pay-in will be much smaller than a pension earned for 30-40s pay-in, of course. The problem is many people may have spent the majority of their working years in a state that exempted state and city/county employees from paying into SS. Now that the promise of self-guided 401K’s that would in theory have been bought with the ‘extra’ SS exempt paycheck savings haven’t worked out too well for many many people in this boat, they want a do-over. Lots of people hired under states that exempted state/city employees had no choice. The individual isn’t the problem, it’s the states that made faulty calculations, imo. How many billions were sent to Ukr to pour down a rat hole? How many billionaire tax breaks have been doled out?
Recovering people who were caught in the no-win WEP system is a good thing, imo. The country can afford it. Let the dainty, uber moral, pure pearl clutching oligarchs scream. / ;)
edit: correcting the erroneous quarterly calculation in the above comment. 4 quarters per year x 10 years = 40 quarters. The quarters earned can be contiguously, uninterrupted for 10 years; the quarters earned can be separated — 1 or 2 quarters a year over more than 10 years for example.
Adding: The Reagan tax cut was ‘paid for’ by raising the SS retirement age for the younger generation in the 1980s, subjecting SS pensions to taxes, ‘loaning’ some of the SS surplus to the govt to ‘pay for’ the tax cuts, with the promise that the very rich then receiving the benefits of the tax cut would ‘pay back’ the money borrowed from the SS system. They promised, cross their heart and hope to die.
Since then, the Peterson Institute and the Cato Institutes have run think tanks and lobbying efforts to make sure Congress never makes them pay back the money that funded their 1980’s tax cuts.
I’m one of those 2 million mugged by WEP. WEP reduced my SS pension by 50%. I figure it has cost me ~$70K in benefits. I’m not likely to live long enough to recoup that amount from the recent repeal of WEP.
SSA says on their website that it will take available staff at least a year to figure out who is eligible and what amount is to be paid out. The longer they wait the less they will need to repay.
I’m far from destitute, but there are probably many who scrape by.
Has anybody done a serious study of what cutting SS would do to the Main St economy in America? I could only find this (and countless other) Brookings study on “fixing” SS:
Fixing Social Security https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fixing-social-security-blueprint-for-a-bipartisan-solution/
People point out repeatedly how much is sent out by SS to average Americans without also pointing out this is all being spent back into America’s economy. This is not going to some untaxable off shore megacorporation or billionaire’s hoard. It’s not making billionaires, millionaires, or even thousandaries, it’s being spent at your local businesses every day. Cut some fraction of this, and it’s going to blow a big hole in many Main St economies.
Plus, back when civil service was more non-partisan or bi-partisan (it’s funny, when I dealt with civil service types back in the day, most of them were very obviously conservative Republican) I suspect the IG was more than able to root out any serious fraud, and have no reason to suspect that SS was full of fraud. But, as I watched the top of our government, it’s elected offices, get much more obviously corrupt (Pelosi insider trading, Cheney making millions from Halliburton, examples too numerous to mention up to and including Musk’s obvious conflicts) then I began to get worried about government corruption – the fish rots from the head.
It would put the Main St economy in America into the Greatest Ever Depression. I believe that is one of their goals.
They then plan to buy up all the distressed people and distressed assets for pennies on the benjamin. They are Mellonites, even if they don’t have a word for what they are . . . which is Mellonites. They want to achieve what Andrew Mellon wanted to achieve and which he spelled out decades ago.
Here is the quote: ” Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”
Here is the link.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/747203
And here is an article about the Musk plan to abolish Social Security and why Trump’s new Secretary of Commerce supports it.
The article is titled: ” Trump official calls Social Security ‘wrong’ as administration lays groundwork for massive cuts”. Here is the link.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-official-calls-social-security-192404146.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Here is a little relevant quote from the article itself.
” On Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News on Wednesday, recently confirmed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hailed the work of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is “gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick said.
“Think about it. We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements and no one has looked at it before,” he said.
“You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong, so he’s going to cut one trillion,” Lutnick added. “Get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against Americans and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars in revenue, and our objective, under Donald Trump, is to balance this budget.” ”
When Lutnick says . . . ” You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong,” . . . I assume he means morally wrong. ” The Democrats” as a group won’t disagree. If any Democrats as individuals can successfully obstruct this long enough to give other forces time to rally and successfully kill this plan, then those individual Democrats have shown they have actual value and deserve to be voted for again. The rest will show they have no value, which means their constituents have no Representatives in Congress.
( And just because the Democrats as a group won’t disagree, that doesn’t mean the Republicans as a group WILL disagree. The Republicans as a group totally agree with the plan and with the belief that Social Security , Medicare and Medicaid are wrong — morally wrong.)
Well, I never even thought about buying one of his cars or riding in one of his rockets, so there’s that.
What needs to be emphasized is that Social Security and Medicare are NOT funded by general tax revenues. These funds were taken out of WORKERS pockets. Workers wages are assessed for SS and Medicare and the SAME wage amounts are then assessed for income tax purposes, without deducting the SS and Medicare taxes paid. SS and Medicare should not be considered part of the deficit. Before Reagan, these funds were kept in a “lock box”. Reagan merged them with the general fund, likely to make it easier to steal! Time to return to the “lock box”. These are funds that hardworking Americans contributed to their retirement and to their medical benefits during retirement – they are NOT general tax funds!