Tag: social security

Elon Musk’s DOGE Team Uncovers Over 25 Million People Ages 100+ in Social Security Database, Some Older Than the Constitution: “There are a Lot of Vampires Collecting Social Security”

Elon Musk’s DOGE team has unearthed jaw-dropping irregularity from the U.S. Social Security database.

The numbers are truly mind-boggling: over 25 million Americans registered aged 100 and older, with some purportedly older than the U.S. Constitution itself.

Late Sunday night, Musk tweeted a staggering claim accompanied by a table of ages, suggesting that the Social Security Administration might be paying out benefits to “vampires.”

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the ‘death’ field set to FALSE. Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk quipped.

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Why Government Computers Are Such a Mess

Every so often, I get reminded that I’m old, and I’ve been programming for almost 60 years, which is a long time. But 60 years in the business means I’ve seen a lot of things that young naïve programmers have never seen.

This comes up often when people talk about DOGE and the Wizards Academy Musk has put together to help investigate fraud, abuse, and, probably most of all, bureaucratic stupidity.

One of the things I see people — technical people, but young — saying about things like Social Security and the IRS is things like “just dump the whole database into Hadoop.”

The problem with that starts with the fact that it’s not in a database. It’s a wildly heterogeneous collection of different databases, ISAM files, and card images, and I would bet money that a lot of it is on old 7-track tapes. Some of these are probably stored in Iron Mountain or a similar installation. Also, some of the data may still be just on paper, as, apparently, government retirement records are.

So what Big Balls and the other wizards are going to need to do to start with is find the data. 

I’m willing to bet there’s no single catalog of all the data sets. Having found the data, much of it is card images that almost certainly are only documented by COBOL copybooks. (Back in 2020, I wrote about COBOL for the Stack Overflow Blog when it suddenly became trendy as some of these systems desperately needed to be maintained.)

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EXPLOSIVE REVELATION: Elon Musk Exposes $100 Billion in Annual Entitlement Payments to Individuals Without SSNs or IDs — Warns Half Could Be Fraudulent

Elon Musk has revealed what could be the largest financial scandal in American history.

Musk has exposed the Treasury Department’s lax oversight, revealing that over $100 billion annually is being funneled to individuals without traceable Social Security Numbers (SSNs) or identification numbers.

Even more alarming, Musk shared that Treasury staffers estimate at least half of these payments—approximately $50 billion per year or $1 billion per week—to be unequivocally fraudulent.

This announcement comes after a federal judge threw a wrench into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) crusade against government waste, fraud, and abuse, blocking the team from accessing a critical Treasury Department system.

US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, a Barack Obama appointee, cited a risk of “irreparable harm.”

The injunction, which came into effect on Saturday, was pushed by 19 far-left state attorneys general, who apparently prefer maintaining the status quo of unchecked government expenditure over transparency and accountability.

Engelmayer has scheduled a hearing for February 20, leaving DOGE with limited access to data that’s vital for exposing the misuse of taxpayer dollars.

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Senate Banking Committee Member Elizabeth Warren Does Not Understand How Social Security Works

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) continues to display her ignorance.  In a failed effort to criticize Elon Musk, Warren reveals she apparently does not understand how Social Security works.

Warren wrote on X, “When Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, is set to pay the same amount in taxes for Social Security as your neighborhood dentist, we’ve got a problem.”

“I’m fighting to get the wealthy to pay their fair share into Social Security so we can increase benefits.”

Warren, a ranking member of the Senate Baking Committee, seems unaware that Social Security earnings and payouts are both capped.

In 2025, the cap on income subject to SS taxes is $176,100.

The max payout is between $2,831 and $5,108, depending on the age you retire.

As one X user notes, if Musk was taxed without a cap, his payout without a cap would be staggering.

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After Lying That Trump Wants to Cut Social Security, Dems Rush Bill That Will Cut Benefits – Need Biden to Sign Before Trump Arrives

Democrats have been caught doing the very thing they’ve been accusing President-elect Donald Trump of doing: Cutting Social Security.

On Wednesday, the U.K. Daily Mail reported Senate Democrats are trying to push through a Social Security reform bill they want to see signed by President Joe Biden before Trump takes office.

The Social Security Fairness Act aims to repeal provisions that reduce payouts to public sector employees like police officers, firefighters, teachers, and post workers. The Mail cites The Committee for a Responsible Budget in their article, and that group states this would make Social Security insolvent six months earlier than current projections by giving increased benefits to 3 million people who paid into their state or local pensions that did not pay Social Security.

The CRFB also states, “As a result, we estimate a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033 would see their benefits cut by an additional $25,000 over their lifetime.”

The think tank says if Social Security runs out of money under this bill, as much as $400,000 in benefits would be lost for the average couple. CRFB states the cost for the bill over the next decade — citing the Congressional Budget Office — would be $190 billion.

After already passing in the House of Representatives, the push for a vote in the Senate comes from Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer while Republican Sen. Rand Paul wants to add an amendment to the bill gradually raising the age of retirement to 70.

Paul spoke on the matter to The Hill.

“It speeds the bankruptcy of Social Security. Social Security is due to go bankrupt in 2034. This will speed it up by a year or so. It’s $200 billion added to a program that is already short of money,” he said, following up by commenting, “If you’re going to add to its mandate by expanding it, you should pay for it.”

Schumer tried to pose the effort on X in the most altruistic fashion last week, saying, “It would ensure Americans are not erroneously denied their well-earned social security benefits simply because they chose at some point to work in their careers in public service.”

Despite this appearing to be an expansion of Social Security, it is a short-term payoff for some that will ultimately be incredibly costly.

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Democrats Aren’t Really Protecting Social Security

The discussion over the future of Social Security has once again drifted to the sidelines this political season. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because it has pulled a vanishing act every election year over the past decade.

While you have likely heard that the program pays more than 70 million people, not many address the fact that another 30 million Americans are about to start collecting Social Security over the coming decade. Although monthly Social Security payments may not be important to every one of these people, roughly 40 percent will depend on their Social Security check as their primary source of income. Basically, the program is a lifeline to millions of Americans. 

For most of us, these people are also known as mom and dad; ma and pa; and soon enough, the person in the mirror. Despite the importance of the program, any question about the reliability of its payments drifts from election to election as it maintains its inevitable course toward insolvency. 

Against this backdrop, voters need to consider that the longer we do nothing, the worse the problem gets. Or put another way, the greatest threat to Social Security is the passage of time and the politics of the status quo.

To illustrate this point, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) co-sponsored the Social Security Expansion Act of 2019. That proposal was based on the 2018 Trustees Report, which used data from the year ending 2017. So, the last time that the current Democrat nominee for president looked at the problem, it was nearly half the size that it is today.

Moreover, Harris’ proposal didn’t deal with the entirety of the problem as it was. It came up 20 percent short of what the problem was even back then.

As another example, presidential candidate Joe Biden back in 2020 argued that the wealthy should pay their fair share. He defined wealthy as those earning more than $400,000 in annual income. In 2024, the definition hasn’t changed despite inflation levels the country hasn’t seen in decades. In a growing economy, the definition of rich should rise faster than inflation. In Biden’s mind, the measure fell by nearly 20 percent in real terms purely as a matter of the clock going tick-tock.

Folks, the clock continues to tick. On August 14, Kamala Harris released a statement: “For 89 years, Social Security has made the difference between poverty or peace of mind for millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and other beneficiaries. As President, I will protect and expand these bedrock programs.”

In the five minutes that it took her team to post that empty rhetoric, the program generated another $5 million in empty promises. 

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