Sourced from Wikipedia.
Sourced from the Social Security Administration, according to Elon Musk.
Some reconciliation of these numbers needs to occur. The obvious place to start is verifying Musk's figures are accurate, and the Social Security Administration does in fact have these figures. If that's right, then there's a significant delta that needs to be figured out.
5 comments:
Could some of that be people who were already 60 years old when they got their SSN in the 30s? Are we certain this list is people who the SSA thinks are still alive and are collecting?
Above age 180, that many typos carried over seems plausible. Birth years of 1852 or 1752 from human error...could be.
Are we certain this list is people who the SSA thinks are still alive and are collecting?
Of course it is. The credentialed elites running the SSA--who are ever so much smarter than us petty average Americans--say so. They wouldn't lie to us. We're not worth the trouble, if they notice us at all other than as votes to be harvested every so often.
Alternatively, they don't care to correct their mistakes: that's not worth their trouble. After all, it's not like it's their money, or they have anything at stake in these. It's only our money, and we are just votes to be harvested.
Does a farmer care that he misplants a seed or two of his wheat in the spring? He still gets plenty of wheat to harvest when it's time.
Eric Hines
If I recall correctly this is just a quick and dirty tabulation of the ages of people in a Social Security database. I don't believe there's been an attempt to correlate them with payments. Adding to AVIs theory, Social Security numbers were first issued in 1936 or about 90 years ago. I don't think it would be at all unusual to find that millions of adults in the 1930s and 1940s were issued numbers but never applied for or received benefits, and nobody bothered to inform the Social Security Administration of their deaths for that reason. It looks like there were over 60 million people between 20 and 40 in 1940. Social Security was far from universal when first enacted. Self-employed people weren't covered until the mid-1950s, government employees were under separate retirement systems, and railroad workers still can opt out of Social Security benefits if they get more from the Railroad Retirement system. That wouldn't have stopped people from applying for id number though.
Musk's tweet says that for that list, the date of death is set to FALSE, so SS is not claiming they are still alive. A commenter at Althouse also thought those over 150 were data entry problems. However, he also said "those between 120-150 are buried in their grandkids' backyard."
Japan had a similar problem before reform, which is why they always got this great press about how many centenarians there were because of their diet. The kids didn't report the deaths and just kept collecting.
Yeah, I get the COBOL issue for 150+; that's possibly an artifact of how antiquated the base system is. That's a solvable problem presumably, and it's not a big part of the problem: that's >2MM of the numbers of presumptively false/flawed entries.
For every cohort between 110 and 150, there's >3MM entries. I'm guessing there's a reasonable chance that most/nearly-all of those will prove to be false collectors. If we estimate $2K/month for each of those (SS averages $1,800/month but there are some admin costs that suggest just using the round number) that's $349,877,064,000.00 a year in fraudulent benefits.
So that's not quite half the DOD's annual budget. Over at D29's place, I made the point that looking into DOD waste is not where the real money is going to be; it's going to be in HHS, to include Social Security. There's just so much more money spent on this than on defense; on this one inquiry we've found half the DOD budget in suspect payments to look into.
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