Spot on. A national birth and death database combined with photo ID. Roll it into a voter ID bill to get the liberty loving far right who fear the feds on board. Sell it to Dems as a way to make sure people get benefits they are entitled to. Fund the program so the poor, homeless, etc can get ID for free. We really should have a national database here
I don't see this article supporting its conclusion. You admit that the SSDB is a mess and that the system for ensuring death notifications is weak. Seems ripe for fraud. But you say not much fraud is happening, and you know that because... the OIG concluded that. Is there a reason to think they did a really competent and honest investigation? Isn't this the conclusion that was a good career move for them? Is there enough detail in the report that you can go through and confirm it?
I'm not saying we should trust Musk, but you've still got to make a case here.
Is Matt being deliberately obtuse saying he doesn't understand this strategy? Trump/Musk aren't trying to convince people they should run the US government, they're trying to convince people they should replace the US government.
As far as explanations go, there has always been a segment of Republicans that are just firmly opposed to SSA (or want to privatize it), in the same way there are Republicans with an axe to grind against public education, Medicaid, and the U.S. Postal Service. It may be a firm belief that private entities should perform those functions, or they are just deeply unable to support systems that make life slightly better for people who aren't born wealthy. We can try to guess the mercurial motives of Trump, Musk, Bannon, Steven Miller, etc. until the cows come home, and I suspect we would just wind up staring at a Venn Diagram in which the center is an unfathomable black void, teaming with cheeseburger-scented, Lovecraftian horrors.
I have been doing some genealogical research off and on for years. I had a pretty eccentric great aunt who lied about her age for years, claiming to be years younger while she was married to a much younger man (by about 14 years). At various points, this deception included passing her own son off as her nephew at one point. Eventually she came clean and they stayed married until she died. As I was going through public records, I could see that she had progressively shaved a few years here and there off her age on census forms and other documents. By the time she died, even Social Security death index had her listed about ten years younger than her actual age. She was born around 1910 or so. She did work off and on over the years, but I'm not sure if she claimed any benefits.
Hey, some people kiss feet! Their kink may not be your kink, but their kink is ok, and totally compatible with being American! We just don’t require foot-kissing as a way to interact with elected officials.
"Beyond the fact that the administration is full of extremely dishonest people who like to lie about things, I genuinely don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish by misleading people about this."
I thought Brian Beutler had a pretty convincing explanation for this on Politix: they are trying to undermine public support for the program by spreading false information about it, so that they don't pay a heavy political price for cutting it.
SATIRE... Good suggestion... It is clear that this requires the cooperation of the person, e.g.
It should be a crime for any person who does not report, by certified signature, that they are born within 10 days, and that they died.
If they commit the crime of not declaring that they are born, then, of course, any citizenship will be one of the penalties, and they will have to re-apply as an UnDocumented Immigrant.
If they commit the crime of not declaring their death, then any wealth will be used to help decrease the national debt.
My mother passed away earlier this year. The funeral director was required to report her death to social security. Her payments stopped immediately. I think this is how the system usually works. Sometimes a payment is made after death because of timing, those payments are recovered.
Yes and the funeral director was very insistent on getting the SSN so he could file the paperwork. He was so insistent that I figured there must be some sort of penalty if he missed one.
A fun little explainer on Social Security Cards/numbers, what they were designed to do, and how they got co-opted into being an ersatz national ID card:
When you keep thinking “I don't understand why Trump and Musk are lying about this,” you must at least consider the idea that they think it’s true!
Musk has strong priors that tell him that the government is poorly run and that his particular faction of big tech could fix all of it instantly. When he and his team of tweens examine various executive agencies and wonder “why does something work this way,” his impulse is strongly predisposed toward “because government is stupid and being taken advantage of,” rather than “because it’s complicated and not quite as weird as at seems at first glance, hence I should reserve judgment until I understand it better.”
As for Trump: I don’t think it’s useful to speculate about whether Trump is truly lying or is just misinformed. I’m convinced there’s a significant amount of overlap between them in his mind.
Based on previous evidence, I suspect Musk has a similar sort of “retconning” he applies to his own memories. When his strong claim is proven false, I think he lies to himself and decides that he meant something different — or that disproving the literal thing he said is just a cynical tactic and he was actually speaking about a _deeper_ truth that has not yet been refuted. Narcissists cannot be wrong.
The “are they lying to others or to themselves” saga has been going on for years. As little as I enjoy psychoanalyzing politicians with personality disorders, it’s hard to write about this stuff without at least dabbling in it. I'm extremely reluctant to spend any more of my short time on earth thinking about what Trump _thinks_, but at a certain point both he and Musk no longer deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt here.
What I think we’re dealing with is the very first clicktocracy - rule by the very online. These are people whose views of the world are entirely found online, the type of people who think online is more real than real. For things he has direct experience with Musk at least as that. But outside of that all experience is online.
This is all very straightforward. Yes, Trump is lying, because of course he is. Yes, we should have a national birth/death registry and a rationally designed national ID system. A+, no notes.
Meanwhile, ICE agents seized a Green Card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, who has said bad/anti-Semitic/pro-Hamas things, and are holding him at a facility in an unknown location (Louisiana?) and threatening to deport him.
I don't like Khalil and I don't agree with his views, but we're talking about government agents arresting a Green Card holder, who is in this country *legally*, and threatening him with deportation for saying bad things.
"The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens."
Social security numbers are a ubiquitous way for a jillion other entities to rely on for loans, for aid, employment, etc. So even if it's 'only' some billions of dollars in improper SS payments, it could be possible that SS numbers of dead people in the wrong hands are being used in all kinds of other ways to perpetuate fraud in all kinds of areas. If I deposit $100,000 in the bank and they say, well, we credited you with $99,000 and we think that's good enough. $1000 isn't the point, even though $1000 will pay for a lot of things, it's the sloppiness. Likewise, $10 billion could pay for a lot of things. If they can miss that what else can they miss? I don't expect the govt to be 100% but the overlap between agencies and other entities is such that many more dollars in fraud could be happening as collateral damage. Clean it up.
Unfortunately, the political lift here is to say that Trump is lying about dead people and therefore we should give Trump a consolidated national ID system.
I keep thinking about how my mother died around midnight on the last day of the month. I had been helping her out financially while still at the age where I feared "baglady syndrome" for myself. I would have welcomed the following month's SS payment, paltry as it was for most women in those days.
Spot on. A national birth and death database combined with photo ID. Roll it into a voter ID bill to get the liberty loving far right who fear the feds on board. Sell it to Dems as a way to make sure people get benefits they are entitled to. Fund the program so the poor, homeless, etc can get ID for free. We really should have a national database here
I don't see this article supporting its conclusion. You admit that the SSDB is a mess and that the system for ensuring death notifications is weak. Seems ripe for fraud. But you say not much fraud is happening, and you know that because... the OIG concluded that. Is there a reason to think they did a really competent and honest investigation? Isn't this the conclusion that was a good career move for them? Is there enough detail in the report that you can go through and confirm it?
I'm not saying we should trust Musk, but you've still got to make a case here.
Is Matt being deliberately obtuse saying he doesn't understand this strategy? Trump/Musk aren't trying to convince people they should run the US government, they're trying to convince people they should replace the US government.
As far as explanations go, there has always been a segment of Republicans that are just firmly opposed to SSA (or want to privatize it), in the same way there are Republicans with an axe to grind against public education, Medicaid, and the U.S. Postal Service. It may be a firm belief that private entities should perform those functions, or they are just deeply unable to support systems that make life slightly better for people who aren't born wealthy. We can try to guess the mercurial motives of Trump, Musk, Bannon, Steven Miller, etc. until the cows come home, and I suspect we would just wind up staring at a Venn Diagram in which the center is an unfathomable black void, teaming with cheeseburger-scented, Lovecraftian horrors.
I have been doing some genealogical research off and on for years. I had a pretty eccentric great aunt who lied about her age for years, claiming to be years younger while she was married to a much younger man (by about 14 years). At various points, this deception included passing her own son off as her nephew at one point. Eventually she came clean and they stayed married until she died. As I was going through public records, I could see that she had progressively shaved a few years here and there off her age on census forms and other documents. By the time she died, even Social Security death index had her listed about ten years younger than her actual age. She was born around 1910 or so. She did work off and on over the years, but I'm not sure if she claimed any benefits.
IIRC, it’s not so much privacy as prophecy: evangelicals believe that it heralds the anntichrist and his mark.
Lara Trump says we should kiss the feet of Trump and Musk. We are Americans - we don’t kiss people’s feet. Fuck her!
Hey, some people kiss feet! Their kink may not be your kink, but their kink is ok, and totally compatible with being American! We just don’t require foot-kissing as a way to interact with elected officials.
True, I’ll admit that I’ve actually kissed a number of feet in real life.
"Beyond the fact that the administration is full of extremely dishonest people who like to lie about things, I genuinely don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish by misleading people about this."
I thought Brian Beutler had a pretty convincing explanation for this on Politix: they are trying to undermine public support for the program by spreading false information about it, so that they don't pay a heavy political price for cutting it.
SATIRE... Good suggestion... It is clear that this requires the cooperation of the person, e.g.
It should be a crime for any person who does not report, by certified signature, that they are born within 10 days, and that they died.
If they commit the crime of not declaring that they are born, then, of course, any citizenship will be one of the penalties, and they will have to re-apply as an UnDocumented Immigrant.
If they commit the crime of not declaring their death, then any wealth will be used to help decrease the national debt.
Insert own joke about zombies submitting signed affidavits of their deaths (right before eating the SSA agent's brains).
My mother passed away earlier this year. The funeral director was required to report her death to social security. Her payments stopped immediately. I think this is how the system usually works. Sometimes a payment is made after death because of timing, those payments are recovered.
Yes and the funeral director was very insistent on getting the SSN so he could file the paperwork. He was so insistent that I figured there must be some sort of penalty if he missed one.
A fun little explainer on Social Security Cards/numbers, what they were designed to do, and how they got co-opted into being an ersatz national ID card:
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus?si=2efDXPwC2XSZgbo2
When you keep thinking “I don't understand why Trump and Musk are lying about this,” you must at least consider the idea that they think it’s true!
Musk has strong priors that tell him that the government is poorly run and that his particular faction of big tech could fix all of it instantly. When he and his team of tweens examine various executive agencies and wonder “why does something work this way,” his impulse is strongly predisposed toward “because government is stupid and being taken advantage of,” rather than “because it’s complicated and not quite as weird as at seems at first glance, hence I should reserve judgment until I understand it better.”
As for Trump: I don’t think it’s useful to speculate about whether Trump is truly lying or is just misinformed. I’m convinced there’s a significant amount of overlap between them in his mind.
Based on previous evidence, I suspect Musk has a similar sort of “retconning” he applies to his own memories. When his strong claim is proven false, I think he lies to himself and decides that he meant something different — or that disproving the literal thing he said is just a cynical tactic and he was actually speaking about a _deeper_ truth that has not yet been refuted. Narcissists cannot be wrong.
The “are they lying to others or to themselves” saga has been going on for years. As little as I enjoy psychoanalyzing politicians with personality disorders, it’s hard to write about this stuff without at least dabbling in it. I'm extremely reluctant to spend any more of my short time on earth thinking about what Trump _thinks_, but at a certain point both he and Musk no longer deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt here.
What I think we’re dealing with is the very first clicktocracy - rule by the very online. These are people whose views of the world are entirely found online, the type of people who think online is more real than real. For things he has direct experience with Musk at least as that. But outside of that all experience is online.
The government get information on me like my name, address, how much I earn and what benefits I might qualify for?
Over my undead 400 year-old body!
This is all very straightforward. Yes, Trump is lying, because of course he is. Yes, we should have a national birth/death registry and a rationally designed national ID system. A+, no notes.
Meanwhile, ICE agents seized a Green Card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, who has said bad/anti-Semitic/pro-Hamas things, and are holding him at a facility in an unknown location (Louisiana?) and threatening to deport him.
I don't like Khalil and I don't agree with his views, but we're talking about government agents arresting a Green Card holder, who is in this country *legally*, and threatening him with deportation for saying bad things.
John Ganz over on his Substack nails it: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-abduction-of-mahmoud-khalil
"The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens."
Social security numbers are a ubiquitous way for a jillion other entities to rely on for loans, for aid, employment, etc. So even if it's 'only' some billions of dollars in improper SS payments, it could be possible that SS numbers of dead people in the wrong hands are being used in all kinds of other ways to perpetuate fraud in all kinds of areas. If I deposit $100,000 in the bank and they say, well, we credited you with $99,000 and we think that's good enough. $1000 isn't the point, even though $1000 will pay for a lot of things, it's the sloppiness. Likewise, $10 billion could pay for a lot of things. If they can miss that what else can they miss? I don't expect the govt to be 100% but the overlap between agencies and other entities is such that many more dollars in fraud could be happening as collateral damage. Clean it up.
The worst fraud is parents taking out credit cards in their young children’s names
Unfortunately, the political lift here is to say that Trump is lying about dead people and therefore we should give Trump a consolidated national ID system.
I keep thinking about how my mother died around midnight on the last day of the month. I had been helping her out financially while still at the age where I feared "baglady syndrome" for myself. I would have welcomed the following month's SS payment, paltry as it was for most women in those days.
My condolences.