That's how Jeff Childers headlines this morning's article at Coffee & Covid. Looking at the numbers he provides, I'd say he's not wrong!
A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.
But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.
. . .
In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.
🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:
Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.
I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).
Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.
This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.
There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.
This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.
There's more at the link.
For once, I'm at a loss for words, so I'll let Mr. Childers say it for me. "This is a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions." How many of those 64 million "extra" Social Security Numbers were/are receiving benefits? How many were/are registered to vote? Perhaps most important, who signed them up for benefits and/or put them on voters' rolls? Every single one of those responsible is guilty of fraud, and should be prosecuted and punished accordingly.
Even if most of those "extra" 64 million SSN's were not receiving benefits and/or were not registered to vote, their very existence is a blunder of massive proportions. How can we trust the Social Security Administration in any way when they can't even properly maintain their core database, the one on which they base all their decisions and all their forecasts? Our SSN's are the key identifier for almost every single government database - federal, state and local - on which our national administration depends. How can that be sustainable when so many SSN's are fake and/or inaccurate?
Furthermore, as noted last Friday, this isn't a Democratic Party problem alone. The Republican Party had access to those same earlier reports, and also did nothing about them. The abdication of responsibility by both major political parties over many years is simply mind-boggling. How can we trust them to govern us if they ignore problems of such staggering magnitude, despite those problems being repeatedly brought to their attention?
Heads need to roll for this, and not only those currently occupying positions responsible for this mess. Their predecessors, who created the mess and allowed it to get worse and worse, should be held accountable too.
The next question, of course, is whether or not this problem can be fixed. We can't just hack our way through the SSN database, deleting anything that doesn't "feel" right. That's not difficult to do with ages over, say, 110 years; but what about the undoubted millions of SSN's assigned to people who may well be alive, statistically speaking? We can't just delete them. We have to check on every single one - and trust those doing the checking to be both rigorous and honest in their work. Rogue political partisans may be expected to try to include as many of "their" fake SSN's as possible in the updated database. How will we be able to spot them, and deal with them?
The Augean stables begin to look like an easy vacation job for teens by comparison . . .
Peter
27 comments:
It's not that the people are stupid, it's that they are trusting. In a representative Republic, we trust our representatives to act to the good of the people.
Where but in corruption is the virtue of trust so sullied as to become the object of derision?
Start with the 1.5 million 150 and over. Each payment was cashed or deposited. Go back to the institution and ask for proof(account info or ID of person who cashed check). If they can not supply proof, ask for a "refund". See how fast they turn on the "higher ups".
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Many companies have a policy of 'do the right thing'. What a load of crap. It's like a game of 'whack a mole'. Stick your head up to identify something out of balance or plain wrong and identify oneself as a goody-two-shoes to be scheduled to be whacked. Walmart is notorious for this. Why should we expect the government bureaucracy to be any different.Do the right thing at one's own peril.
Here is another thought, where else in the government databases do those 64 million SSNs exist? Do the show up in the population counts of some states? 64 million "people" are roughly 85 House seats.
The answer is really simple: good governance is *boring*, and doesn't have the shiny appeal of having some kind of vision of the future.
The SS fund isn't going bankrupt because people are living longer and less people are paying- it's because there's trillions that are unaccounted for or going to zombies/fraudsters.
So for the SSI that has been active for 360 to 369 years, is the number 000-00-001?
This makes me want to violate your blog's civil speech rules.
Now do duplicate SSN's
Some of us have been saying "Burn it all down!" for years. Some of us have said you cannot fix 'the system' from within the system. Some of us have said that every institution, committee, club, hobby, is irretrievalbly broken due to DIE, equalitarianism, minoritarianism, and feminism. I applaud what DOGE is trying to do, but it won't - it can't - go nearly far enough. Time to start over.
And here we thought the zombie apocalypse was coming for brains.
19% of Social Security numbers are wrong. Is there one honest employee in the SS Office? How this is fixed will be seriously interesting. One thing I'm thinking, prosecution, jail time, and forfeiture of assets.
Something is really, really, really wrong here.
If Social Security is sending checks to 19,445,086 people over the age of 100, then there is sheer incompetence here.
The details of the 64 million zombies. That's from the 2020 census data with estimates for the 2023 (since official data is only released every 10 years for representation) from census.gov and compared it to the numbers in Musk's data set.... You will find that it's not just the >99 years old data that is fishy. The total population is 334,914,895 estimated for 2023 yet there are about 399 million active numbers in musk's list - a different of 64 million. Only 20.5 million are over 100 in Musk's list leaving another 44 million to be accounted for - 2X more than the stupidly wrong numbers. There are about 5 million more active SS numbers than the estimated census population (2023) for each of the groups between 20-29 and 90-99 years old.
How did I know to look in these places? Because my job entails a database that is corrected using the social security death index. Around 2012, the social security death index broke - reported deaths greatly decreased - and we had to statistically correct our information or estimates of the future were stupid.
Not to worry; the SS admin is assuring everyone that very few of those over 100's are drawing benefits/cashing checks . . . The unanswered question of course is: if they are not cashing the checks who is?
Well, since they obviously were here before the United States itself was, their SSN should be in negative numbers. :-)
Peter, it was nice meeting you at FenCon this past weekend.
The non-dead centenarians are not the only source of SSN fraud.
There's also the fact that the SSN databases are not properly de-duplicated. That is to say two people can use the same SSN and this is not necessarily flagged as an error - see https://xcancel.com/ZadeSmith4/status/1888651821759299777
It was pointed out to me on a discord server that, as a US non-resident person who was issued an SSN, my SSN is likely in use by some illegal because I have no use for it anymore and no way to find out whether it is used by others or not
I think that we are going to see that EVERY WEEK brings a bigger scandal than the previous week, and this will go on for 4 years. God only knows just how horrible it will all become. Our only hope is that punishments are as brutal as are deserved.
IIRC, at one time they actually re-issued Social Security Numbers, as some of the digits meant something at one time (sort of like the first two digits of a Zip code indicate a region). I would hope that they at least waited until the first person died, but this IS the government we're talking about.
playing devil's advocate here... disasters rarely have a single cause. Also, I am cautious attributing to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. Conspiracies require too many people to keep secrets. There WILL be a %% of accounts which are fraudulent. I would bet that most are a combination of the effects of a) psychopathic & narcissistic senior managers crippling worker output & data entry accuracy, b) compounding politically imposed departmental mission creep without corresponding increase in actual workers (as distinct from policy & project officers, DEI Execs, ministerial advisers, communications professionals, & etc). c) software which is designed to generate fancy but meaningless reports upwards to the executive but inhibits the actual work of the relevant department employees, and which lacks "sanity checking" or duplicate checking because the person buying the software was more interested in reporting functions. d) over-worked low-level employees putting tasks which won't spark complaints to the bottom of the heap - dead people rarely complain if their form isn't processed quickly...
So... high-level incompetence coupled with political appearances. What you get when the people at the top feel thay cannot be seen to make mistakes...
the craziest part of this chart is aged 20-60 there are almost 200 million people on social security? for what? isn't that healthy working age people 20-60 years old? total clown world.
Demand proof of life within 30 days or the payments stop - simple.
I was a bit confused about this part but it would appear that "active SSN" doesn't mean "getting a check". People over 100 aside, there are probably a fair number of SSNs issued to people who became residents but then went home. IIRC when you come here on a work visa you are issued an SSN for tax purposes. So next filter, how many of those people (under 100) have overseas addresses and how many are coded as non-citizen.
Whoever wrote that excerpt is a certified bona fide retard.
There aren't 64 million "zombies", soopergenius.
There are more social security numbers than the population of the United States because many of the "active" numbers are people that have died without being removed from the active roster.
At every age, for every day since Social Security started, in 1935.
File this bit of obviousness under Duh!, Retard.
That there are any numbers for anyone over 200 years of age is the bigger notable point, since a 100-year-old who died the day after registering in 1935 would only be 190 now. So every number above that point is patently fraudulent prima facie, just as all numbers assigned to anyone over 135 are actuarially unlikely as well.
Further information is that few, if any, of those over 100 are currently receiving checks.
Any number registering at greater than 110 should be cancelled automatically.
Anyone still alive after that who comes forward with a complaint should receive a birthday card for the president annually, and double payments every month until their death as recompense for the error.
Going forward, anyone surpassing 105 should have to submit an annual affidavit in order for the number and benefits to remain active.
That would take about 15 minutes to accomplish, and cost about $20.
The first three digits denote the state or territory of issue for your card/number. Always have. Which prefix denotes which state is info available about 200 places online.
And btw, to a metaphysical certainty, a non-zero number of bogus numbers are actually witness protection accounts, CIA officers, and zombies created with government permission to create regular slush funds for black projects.
Anyone with a middle school education would know that without being told.
So some of this is going to uncover black projects, to a 100% certainty.
It should still be corrected, but you should know what you're doing when you dig up a cesspit.
Before we get too awfully upset at the millions of people over 100, maybe we should start looking at their employment records, at the SSA of course. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of them were born, for example, in 1980, but some stumble-fingered, bored, data entry person transposed that to be 1890. Or 1981 gets transposed to 1918.
I was born in the late 1950s. In the early 90s, I submitted a request for my SS records. You had to ask back then. The response I received went something like this: "We can't find your records. Please bring your SS Card and proof of identity to the local office." I did, and when the SS clerk looked it up on the computer she said, again, paraphrasing: "Oh, here's the problem. They had you listed as female." If they can screw up that littlest of issues, an 'F' or an 'M', what can they do with eight numbers that all need to go in a specific order?
The first three numbers only represented specific states and territories until 1972. After that, they corresponded to zip codes, but since 2011, have been randomized and mean nothing any more.
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