So, when Donald Lump and Elon Dusk say that millions of dead Americans are voting, collecting social security, and getting drunk on the weekly gallon of fresh blood they get from SNAP benefits, the MAGA morons actually believe this stuff to be true, and go ahead and vote for Trump. They dislike the Democrat opposition because it is boring and does not offer them fantastic bullshit like that from the twilight zone.
But where are those living dead voters and social secuity recipients?
=================================================
Those millions of dead people supposedly claiming Social Security? It’s obvious now that they were bogus.
Brett Arends
Thu, November 6, 2025
Elon was seeing dead people. - AFP/Getty Images
This article has been updated to correct the name of Charles Blahous.
Save every nickel you can, watch out for the stock-market bubble and prepare to finance much more of your senior years from your own resources than you had expected. Taxes are going to rise, and federal spending will be cut. And if you want to blame someone, blame the American voters, who think for some reason that the basic rules of math and financial gravity don’t apply to the good ol’ U.S. of A. If only that were true.
The latest evidence for the prosecution, as it were, comes from the Social Security rolls, which show that record numbers of people are now claiming monthly benefits. As of the last count, at the end of August, the Social Security Administration reported that there were 67.115 million people claiming Social Security alone, plus another 2.548 million claiming both Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. Total: 69.7 million.
That’s almost exactly 1.5 million more than it was in January.
Why does this matter? Because if you cast your mind back to the winter and the spring, you will remember that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were both promising to save vast sums of money by weeding out all the fraudulent claimants. You will remember Trump, addressing a joint session of Congress in March and on other occasions, reporting that his people had found millions of allegedly dead people still claiming benefits. “We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,” he told Congress and the American people during his nationally televised speech. “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old, it lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119… 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139, 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.”
You can see the clip here. Oh, and watch House Speaker Mike Johnson shake his head in sorrow, a pained expression on his face, as the president lists this shocking litany of fraud.
Trump added that there were “1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are over 160 years old…1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229, one person between the ages of 240 and 249, and one person is listed at 360 years of age.”
“Money is being paid to many of them and we’re searching right now,” Trump said. “A lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid and nobody does…and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.”
He added, “We’re going to find out where that money’s going and it’s not going to be pretty. By slashing all of the fraud, waste and theft, we can find we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families.”
By my math, that’s 20.6 million extra people that were on the Social Security books, “many of them” claiming benefits.
The president was repeating claims first made by Musk, head of his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” who said this “might be the biggest fraud in history.”
So where are these bogus claimants? Where are these massive savings?
They don’t exist. They never did. The numbers that Musk and Trump implied were evidence of massive fraud were merely database errors — as “libtards” and “fancy-pants so-called experts” claimed all along.
“Bottom line, they couldn’t do anything about these supposedly improper payments because they weren’t happening,” Social Security expert Charles Blahous told me. “They were simply misreading a data file.” Blahous, incidentally, is a fellow at George Mason University’s conservative-leaning Mercatus Institute. (He also served as a Social Security and Medicare trustee under President Obama, and was deputy director of former President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council).
I asked the Trump administration what savings they had achieved. A spokesperson within the Social Security Administration replied that, “to eliminate the opportunity for fraud using SSNs [Social Security Numbers], we added over 12.4 million individuals aged 120 and over to the Death Master File.”
Also, they said, they had worked with the Department of Homeland Security “to update the records of 275,000 individuals no longer holding legal status, ensuring those who are ineligible to receive benefits are not improperly paid.”
Those are my italics. They did not say that those 275,000 people failed to hold legal status at the time they were added to the Social Security database, only that they “no longer” held legal status. And they didn’t say people who were ineligible to receive benefits had been getting them. Only that they were “ensuring” that they didn’t.
If the administration had actually found millions or even hundreds of thousands of people defrauding Social Security, do you think they might have mentioned it? Or do you think Trump likes to hide his light under a bushel?
White House spokeswoman Liz Huston also sent me a message saying that “President Trump will always protect and strengthen Social Security.”
It’s not even the case that cost-cutting and fraud-busting have slowed the rate of growth. The current number of claimants today is higher than previous forecasts, the administration admits. “The projections in the 2025 OASDI Trustees Report understated the actual number of beneficiaries, which is largely attributable to the temporary increase in application receipts and efforts by the agency to work cases more expeditiously,” said a spokesperson for the Social Security Administration. (OASDI refers to “Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance,” meaning Social Security.)
It was George Santayana who famously said that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We live today in an era where nobody is pressured to learn from the past. They simply block out anything they don’t like. I’m willing to bet that millions of MAGA voters — and others — nodded along like Johnson during Trump’s address, when he promised to save trillions by weeding out all these millions of fraudulent claimants. Few, if any, of them will read this article or will say, “you know what, Trump was wrong about that and his critics were right.” The human brain does not like changing its mind or admitting it was wrong, a design flaw that psychologists call “confirmation bias.” Such people will be, right now, on other websites, which continue to tell them what to hear.
(Fanatical liberals are a little better. You can’t reason with them either, although they will call you “literally Hitler” instead of “libtard.” In my long experience they also spell better. A fascinating research study recently showed that the brain activity of left-wing fanatics and right-wing fanatics is pretty much the same. Which will come as little or no surprise to the rest of us.)
With apologies to Leo Tolstoy, fanatics are all alike, while each moderate is moderate in their own way.
This brings us, full circle, to the nonexistent Social Security “savings,” the president’s claims of trillions in federal fraud, the state of U.S. politics, and your and my retirement savings.
Social Security and Medicare, the retirement system upon which America depends, cannot survive on their own resources. Their “trust funds” are grotesquely underfunded. In total, government accountants report, the two programs would need an immediate injection of $88 trillion to be made self-sustaining. That’s about three years of annual U.S. gross domestic product.
Without injections of public money, Social Security’s trust fund will run out of reserves in 2034 and Medicare “part A” in 2033. Medicare part B has no trust-fund reserves: The government pays the bills each year out of general taxation.
Meanwhile, the federal budget on which they will have to depend for a bailout is spiraling into disaster, fueled to a large part by the polarization that has produced complete dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the current shutdown.
Last January, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that Uncle Sam would spend $89 trillion over the next 10 years, while taking in only $67.5 trillion in taxes. Since then, Congress and the president have added a projected $3.6 trillion to those deficits through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Trump’s tariffs, or import taxes, will offset only some of the OBBBA’s extra deficits, according to analysts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. And that’s assuming they survive their challenge in the Supreme Court, which is impossible to handicap. (The Congressional Research Service recently pointed out that “the Constitution grants Congress the power to lay and collect tariffs and to regulate commerce with foreign nations,” but does anybody care about the Constitution anymore?)
The sad news for extreme partisans on both sides is that the markets don’t care about your feelings, your cherished narratives, or all the false and stupid things you and your pals agree on. They only care about math. They surely will not — presumably they cannot — finance this debt spiral indefinitely. Every authority calls this trajectory unsustainable.
At some point, spending will be cut and taxes will rise. The likeliest scenario is surely that those who are higher earners will get less than they were counting on. They will get less from Social Security, they will probably get less from Medicare, and they will have to pay more for it. Which puts even more of a financial burden on all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment