June 12, 2025 • 51 mins
Social Security has lifted millions of seniors out of poverty, but it's under attack. In our latest episode, Dean Baker sits down with Nancy Altman, who's spent 50 years defending this critical program. Nancy cuts through the political noise to reveal what's really happening: how interference in the Social Security Administration puts our data at risk, why the system is actually incredibly efficient, and how fraud claims are being weaponized to undermine public trust. This isn't just about retirees. Social Security affects every working American, and the threats Nancy and Dean discuss could impact your future benefits. They make the case for why we need to strengthen - not weaken - this essential safety net.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
- We have this incrediblybloated financial sector.
- It's a phony crisis that it
does. They don't have to be cut.
- We know how to get outof a great depression.
We spend money. If
we take a look at the typical worker,
they're not doing fine.
- Hi, I'm Dean Baker.
I'm your host for thepodcast, mostly Economics.
(00:27):
Today we have on our show NancyAltman, who's the president
of Social Security Works,
and someone who I could sayhas been working on social
security issues even longer than I have.
Uh, Nancy's work goes back,uh, many, many years, uh, back
to the Greenspan Commission in1982, which was the last, uh,
major overhaul of social security.
(00:47):
So when it comes to knowingsocial security, I think very,
very few people can claimgreater authority to Nancy.
So I'm very happy to haveNancy on the show here.
- Thank you so much for having me, Dean.
- Well, we have a lot to talk about today
and, you know, which is both good and bad.
'cause, uh, you and I both feel the same.
Social security's a great program,
(01:08):
and, uh, unfortunatelyit's threatened today
and perhaps a way it never been before.
But to start with, uh,maybe we could just outline,
you know, what you seeas the major features
of Social Security and why,
why it's such an important program.
- Social Security is reallyessential for an, um,
a society where people gettheir, they, their, um,
(01:31):
essentials through workwhere everyone works
and you need work.
There's no uniform, basicincome or anything like that,
because what social security is,
it's insurance against the loss of wages.
As I say, as long asyou, uh, need your salary
or wages to pay for yourhousing and your food
and your clothing and so forth,
(01:52):
you need insurance against their loss.
You can lose that income if you, um,
die leaving young children
who are dependent on those benefits.
You can lose that incomeif you become so disabled
that you cannot supportyourself through work.
Or if you have the good fortuneto live to very old age,
you lose your income if you retire.
(02:13):
Social security ensures wagesin those three categories.
In addition, you can lose your wages
if you become unemployed.
And we don't think ofunemployment insurance
as social security,
but it was part of theSocial Security Act of 1935.
And it's the same concept.
It's insurance against the loss of wages.
(02:33):
And Nina, if I can say onemore thing, it is extremely,
it is strikingly superior
to its private sector counterparts.
It's portable from job tojob. It's extremely secure.
Um, the it's plan sponsoris the federal government,
which is not going out ofbusiness and, uh, can, can tax
(02:54):
and borrow funds and so forth.
So it's strikingly superior.
It's one shortcoming is thatits benefits are too low.
- It's, you know, again, youknow this of course very well.
I mean, it's just remarkablewhat an amazing success story
Social Security has been.
So, you know, presidentRoosevelt support starts
this during the depression.
And at that time to be elderlypretty much meant to be old.
(03:15):
I mean, you're dependent on your family,
so if your family couldsupport you, you're okay.
But a lot of families,particularly during the Depression,
could support their, their aging parents
and the poverty rates were
through the roof for, for the elderly.
And today, I, I haven'tlooked at the latest numbers,
but the poverty rate for peopleover 65, some around 10%,
it's actually a little bit lower than
(03:36):
for the rest of the population.
So that, that's just anamazing success story there.
And as you mentioned, I thinka lot of people forget that,
uh, social security also, uh,
protects people against disability.
So you, uh, somewhere around 10,
12 million people getdisability from Social Security
and then also, um, forchildren of, sort of,
of workers that die young.
(03:58):
And, uh, again, it's almost comical.
Elon Musk was very upset
that you had four year oldsgetting social security.
The rest of us were going, yeah, that's
what happens when you,
unfortunately they had aparent that died young.
That's one of the benefitsof social security.
But you know, he apparentlythought he'd found
new evidence of fraud. So yeah,
(04:19):
- Exactly.
It should just shows hisignorance of the program
and the, as importantas Social Security is
as an anti-poverty program,and it is extremely effective.
In fact, when social security was enacted,
every statement NewMexico had poor houses.
And then those poor houses were people
who normally had workedtheir entire lives,
but in old age did not have family.
(04:42):
You could support them andliterally went to the poor house.
But the difference between that
and means tested programsis that insurance is to,
means tested programsare to alleviate poverty,
but what insurance is it prevents you from
falling into poverty.
So it's, it really is a extremely,
(05:03):
Franklin Roosevelt andhis colleagues really knew
what they were doing when they designed
and created this program.
- Yeah, no, it's an incrediblyimportant point that,
you know, I think isoften underappreciated.
Well, probably not underappreciate, so
unless it's deliberately distorted.
So when people talkabout social security as,
as an entitlement, as a benefit, it is,
but the point is people paid for it.
(05:24):
So it's just like noone would think that if,
if I was paying for, for insurance
and my house burned down, thatsomehow that was a handout.
I mean, I, I paid for the insurance.
That's, that's what social
- Security is, so you didn't get it right.
- Yeah, so, so the the attackson it are just, you know,
again, so I I I don't know
(05:45):
how much it's confusion versusdeliberate misrepresentation
because obviously if your intent is to cut
or destroy the program,
it gets less supportif you could portray it
as a handout rather than, no,
this is the insurance program workers
paid into it their whole lives.
And yeah, they haveevery right in the world
to expect the benefit for it.
(06:05):
- And that's, that is I think, part
of the undermining of social security.
And, and it's really had, I think,
an impact on disability benefits.
And that is somehow to makepeople feel they shouldn't
take those benefits.
That somehow there's something wrong
with those programs when actually it's
deferred compensation.
You know, people don't feel funny about
taking their salaries.
(06:26):
So that's their current cash compensation.
They, you know, if they geta, um, retirement through, uh,
their employer, there's, you know, you're
of course you're gonna get that,
that's part of your compensation.
And social security is the same thing.
In fact, until a few decades ago,
employers would claim SocialSecurity as a benefit that they
(06:48):
provided their workers becausethey do match the worker
contribution dollar for dollar.
But we don't see that anymore.
But it worker, you know,employers would be smart
to take credit for it andto, um, push to improve it.
- You have one more pointabout social security,
which obviously you know verywell, Nancy, that you know,
the, the benefit structure'svery progressive,
(07:09):
and that's, again, quite explicit.
So that, you know,
it's based on youraverage earnings over most
of your working life, your best 35 years.
And for a lot of people, thatis, their whole work might,
I mean, at least theyears that they credited
and you get 90% back of youraverage earnings on year,
you know, the cutoff it 1212.
- So yeah, I haven't looked at what it is
(07:30):
for this year, but it'ssomething like that. Yes.
- Yeah. So you get 90%and ob you know, better
or worse, there's a lot ofpeople in that category.
So they get 90%
of the first 12,000 peoplework part-time part,
they're outta labor force period of time.
Disproportionately that's women, you know,
they spend more time raising kids.
So disproportionatewomen in that category.
But then you get 35% on your next,
(07:51):
and again, I'm shooting in the dark here,
it's roughly 40,000.
You know, we used to knowthese numbers by harm. Yes.
So you get 30, 33% of thenext, let's say 40 or 50,000,
and then higher incomers,you know, they get 15%
of their income above, let's say 60,000.
Again, don't take me to town on that,
but it's somewhere around there.
(08:13):
So it's a very progressivepayback structure, which again,
we could core with whereyou have the cutoffs.
Should it be higher?Nancy's making the point.
It would be good if it werehigher. I'd agree with that.
You know, but you couldtalk about all sorts
of ways to restructure that.
But it's clearly a verybad, very progressive
payback structure, which is one
of the reasons why itkeeps a lot of people,
they have low earnings duringtheir working lifetime,
(08:35):
but even with their low earningsduring their life lifetime,
they could still, it stillgives them enough to stay out
of poverty, which isn't to sayit gives them enough to have
great lifestyle or anything,
but it's enough to keepthem outta property.
- Yeah. And it's, again,
and I think it fits withthe insurance concept
because, you know, it's sortof beyond behind the veil.
(08:55):
You don't know when you'restarting out in your career,
whether, you know, I mean, you can
speculate somebody's has higher education
and so forth, likelyto make a high salary,
but anybody can get hit by a truck
and, um, wind up, um, witha disability where they,
they just cannot supportthemselves through work.
(09:16):
And therefore having
that progressive benefitformula is really beneficial
for everyone at the start ofyour career. You know, and it,
- Yeah, yeah, again, that's,that is again, a point
that has to be emphasized.
'cause I've come across, I'msure you have many people
that really don't understandthat idea of insurance.
They go, well, I've,you know, I'm a lawyer.
I earn 200,000 a year, you know,
(09:36):
which would put you over the top
and you know, your paybackwould be relatively low relative
to your two thou 200,000 a year.
Because you're at the highend, you're getting, you know,
15% your average pay goals,it's real bad deal for you.
Well, maybe they're ableto work their whole life
as a lawyer and it ends upnot being that good a payback.
Well, you know, I'm in good health.
My health insurance hasbeen a real bad deal for me.
(09:58):
So I angry you,
- My, my hat's never burned down.
So there you go. And I've always had fire
insurance- .
Yeah, yeah. You know, so, so
that's the nature of it being insurance.
And you know, as, as you saida moment ago, I mean, yeah,
you know, you have a good job.
You, you know, it turns outyou earn 200,000 a year,
your whole working life, so it
doesn't give you that good of payback.
But there's no guarantee youdon't get hit by a truck.
(10:19):
You don't get real sick. I, youknow, we've all known people
that, you know, they're relatively young
and they have somethingthat happens to them.
And even though they'reon a good career track
where they would've hadhigh earnings, they don't,
because, you know, they, they get sick
or they were in an accident,
and you know, from the time they're 33,
they're barely able to work.
Yeah. Maybe not work at all.
They're gonna get a better, you know,
they'll get a good return ontheir social security benefits.
(10:42):
It's, again, it's importantto understand it's insurance.
That's the design. Wearen't making up words here.
It's actually called, youknow, uh, social insurance.
- Sure. That's yes. Survivors.
And in fact, um, one ofthe stories I I read about
that really struck me
and that I really like to talkabout is social security is
disproportionately beneficial
(11:03):
to those who've beendisadvantaged in the workplace.
So people of color, women,lgbtq plus community,
but it's actually importantfor, you know, I like
to joke wealthy white men as well,
because, um, there was astory that, uh, about a couple
did very well, were retiredin Florida, had millions
(11:24):
of dollars, had a very pleasantlifestyle and so forth,
but made one mistake.
They happened to put all oftheir, give all their money
to invest to Bernie Madoff.
And when they woke up
and found out what hadhappened, they were destitute
and they only had their social security.
And thank god they hadthat social security
'cause they would've been on the street.
(11:45):
So again, we, it, it, it's insurance.
It's there to protect you as, as you
and I say, you know, alot of kinds of insurance.
You'd rather, I I'd prefer topay for disability insurance
and never collect disability insurance,
but it is there ifsomething were to happen.
- Yeah. It's also, and,
(12:05):
and again, uh, obviouslyNancy knows this very well.
I mean, it's incredibly efficient.You made this point out.
It's, you know, superior to private plans.
I, you know, we've bothbeen in this debate forever.
I dunno how many times, you know,
I've gone up against the privatizing
and go, oh, it's just,you know, 1% a year.
If you have a 401k, oftenthey're considerably
that often the administrativecosts, they're often
around one half, even 2% peoplehave analyzed that closely.
(12:28):
So you often have a lot of plans
where they're very highadministrative costs.
But what's important tounderstand, they compare that
to the administrativecost for social security,
which is less than four tenths of 1% of
what it pays out the benefits each year.
So they compare the oneone 5% for, for their 401k
to the four tenths, and they go,
eh, it's not that different.
(12:49):
That's very misleading.
'cause let's say I put my $10,000 in 401k,
they're charging me one, 1.5% each year.
So if it's sitting in that 401k for 20
or 30 years, I've paidmaybe 25, even 30% of
what I'm ultimately gonna get out of that.
I've paid that to the company,to the financial company
(13:10):
that's administering the 401k.
So we aren't just talkingabout, well, even 1% for 4s,
it's more than twice as much.
Yeah. But even that's a big difference.
But it's actually much more,
we're talking about sayingit's more than a order
of magnitude different,which, you know, to my view,
that's one of the big reasons why there's
so many people interest in privatizing it,
because that's waste.
You, oh, I think Dogelooking to get rid waste.
(13:33):
Well, that's some serious waste.
But that waste is income for, for banks,
for insurance companies,for, for businesses
and financial industrythat would love to be able
to get their hands onsocial security funds.
So that's, yeah. You know,again, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- No, no, I was gonna just agree with you.
I mean, that's exactly what I think, um,
is going on right now is,you know, as much as, um,
(13:57):
George W President Bushback in 2005 sought
to privatize Social security
and I think security forjust that reason, that, so
that there could be, um, um,the Wall Street could make,
you know, about $1.5 trillion flows
through Social Security every year.
Wall Street gets none of that.
And they would like to get a,a big chunk of that, at least
(14:20):
for administration andbrokerage fees and so forth.
Um, but to George w Bush's credit,
he at least had a proposalthat he put on the table
and went around and talkedabout, and you and I
and others could debate about it
and show all the problems with it.
And it didn't even get a votein a Republican held Congress
because it was such an unpopular, um,
(14:42):
idea and such a bad idea.
But what they're doing now is worse,
which is all behind closed doors.
I mean, you mentioned Doge,Elon Musk's department
of supposed to be ofgovernment efficiency,
but it's really creatingenormous amount of waste
and inefficient and inefficiency and, um,
and opening the door to outright fraud.
(15:04):
- Yeah. Just to, to back up,
we'll come back to that in a second.
I just wanted to, you know, emphasize some
of the misleading claims thatreally, you know, often made,
but certainly made by ElonMusk about social security.
So one, he's, I don'tknow what's in his head,
so I can't say what he's convinced of,
but he constantly talksabout the fraud there.
And, you know, again, this isone of these things, you know,
I mean, it's more general with Doge,
(15:27):
of course there's waste, of course
there's fraud in the government.
You know, it's a huge enterprise.
How can you dish out $7 trillion a year
and not think there's some fraud?
And we do have, you know,
the general Account GovernmentAccountability Office,
which actually does do that.
We have inspector generalsat Social Security,
at the other agencies that spend careers.
(15:48):
They have professionals.They've been looking at this
for years and years and years.
And you know, in thecase of social security,
they have looked for fraud.
And they know it's very rare.
And you might have the data on that.
- I do. It's, I mean,you're exactly right.
You know, they're runningaround claiming all
this, um, fraud.
But this is another way thatsocial security is superior.
(16:11):
There's much more fraudin private, um, insurance.
You know, the American Academy
of Actuaries have done studies about that
with very widespread fraud.
And a lot of private sector insurance,
social security has been audited.
It's constantly audited.
It's got the Inspector General who again,
if the Trump administrationwere concerned about fraud,
(16:34):
I think their firstmove would not have been
to fire the InspectorGeneral whose job it is
to be looking for that.
Um, and so,
but there's also beenlots of outside auditors.
It's a very heavily audited program.
And what they found is that 99.7%
of all the payments areaccurate in full on time
(16:56):
to the right people.
And that 0.3%, even that most of that is
are, um, payments made in error.
So, for example, whereinformation gets is changed,
it's reported, but
because social security isunderstaffed, it takes a while
to get the information,um, through the systems.
(17:18):
And so there may be severalmonths of overpayments,
or there could be underpayments as well.
They're not fraud, butthey're just mistakes.
And with respect to overpayments,that money is clawed back
as soon as the governmentrealizes it's, um,
it was a higher benefit
that should have beenpaid. And in fact, yeah,
- I can give you a very examplethat I, I, I know someone
(17:40):
who was getting disabilityand her situation improved.
And she sent, she wrote to Social Security
and said, you know, Ishouldn't be getting it.
I'm able to work now, at least the
disability's notpreventing me from working.
And she continued to getchecks for around three months,
four months from whatever the,
whatever the period of time was.
And then they processed it
and they said, oh, okay,you have to get that money.
Give us the money back. Which she did.
(18:01):
You know, so they got the money back.
So, you know, so it was
- Payment, it may not bea loss to the government,
and there tend to be,
and this thank this is thanks
to the Republicans in Congress,
the administration wrongly I think,
or, um, uh, Trump administration'sprobably different,
but prior administrationswere much more diligent about
(18:22):
overpayments than underpayments.
Yeah. You know, and that's, to me is,
is shouldn't be that way.
But, but the point isthat the actual fraud,
and there is, as you say,in any program this size,
there's going to be, thereare gonna be attempts.
And in fact, even fraud, youknow, scam, they, they get
(18:43):
your money deposited from supposed to go
to your bank account, they switch the
bank account or something.
Usually people discover that right away.
And even though they mightnot catch the fraudster,
they stop the, um, fraudulent payments.
So just looking at snapshots doesn't
really tell the full story.
- Yeah. I remember this, again,
(19:04):
I've talked about this in thepast, but the Washington Post,
and this is the sort ofreporting that encourages people
to think poorly of social security.
They had a big front pagestory, jumped to two full pages
inside about how social security paid out.
And I'm forgetting the exactnumber or something, like two
or $3 billion to dead people.
And you know, any of us wouldsee that, you know, well we,
(19:26):
we have our nose of thenumbers, but most people don't.
I don't blame them. Theyhave other things to do.
They have lives to go, oh my God,
they paid out $2 billion for dead people.
And then if you read, if you actually read
through the piece, it wasover, I think five year period
and most of it was gotten back,
and the percentage of the actual payments,
and again, I don't havethe number at my fingertip,
(19:47):
but it was something like 1000th of 1%
of the actual payments.
Now, I, I've raised that people
and go, well, it should be zero.
We'd love it to be zero, butthat's not the real world.
Well, you know, do youwanna spend 10 billion
to catch 2 billion in, in overpayments?
Most of which you get back anyhow.
You know, that's, anyhow,
(20:08):
but that's the sort ofthing because, you know,
- There's also, and some of this also,
people don't understand becauseCongress, in some sense,
the, again, the concerns in Congress are
so concerned about fraud, thatthey have made the program
so incredibly complicated
that in some cases overpaymentsare impossible to avoid.
Lemme give you just one example,
(20:29):
and that is that you, your payment is,
the payment people get is for the month
before your social security benefit.
And to be eligible forthat payment, you have
to be alive every singleday of that month.
Now, I think that's wrong.
I think if you die on thelast day of the month,
you should get a prorated benefit.
You should get most of thebenefit. Um, but you don't.
(20:53):
So imagine someone,
or you don't, I mean, I'msure it happens, happens,
but think of a case wheresomeone dies on the last day
of the month, and thentheir benefit is to be paid
on the first Wednesdayof the following month.
Well, there might only be a day
or two between those two events,
and so there's gonna be an overpayment
(21:14):
because it, the deathhasn't even been reported.
That is an overpayment.
Now, as the government willfind out about that, you know,
two days later, and they'llgo to the bank account
and they'll scoop the money back,
or if the bank account'sbeen closed, they'll go
to the family, a grievingfamily and get the money back.
But that's one where I wouldargue there's no way it can be,
(21:37):
that's not even, um, an error
or careless, it's just you can't get the
information that quickly.
So just because,
and that would be a dead payment,
dead person getting apayment because they're dead.
- And, and that undoubtedlyis the bulk of the, you know,
not necessarily the last day of the month,
but it's someone. But, but
- Something like that where it's, yeah,
(21:58):
- Yeah, that's the bulkof the, it was striking.
And again, obviously you'retotally on top of this Elon Musk
and who know, again, I don't, can't speak
for what's in his head, butsay 20 million, he found a file
that has a hundred, what was it, uh,
20 million people over theage of 115 or something.
And he's going, oh my God,
all these people are getting checks.
And you know, again, if hehad talked to anyone there,
(22:21):
they would've explained to,this is an inactive file.
None of them are gettingchecks. They know they're dead.
And the reason why they don'tclean it up is it would cost
them millions of dollars to clean it up.
Congress doesn't wannagive them, you know, so,
so they have this file, it, it,
it has no consequence for the program.
It's not that they're getting checks.
So yeah, they have a file with people
(22:41):
who are 130 years old if they were alive,
but they know they're alive,they're not getting checks.
- And in fact, I mean,one, um, thing, I, I mean,
that's one thing where, youknow, someone, um, is born,
gets a number and then dies at age 10
and is never gonna get a benefit.
Um, it would be a way, itwould really be a misuse
of dedicated revenueto be cleaning that up,
(23:04):
because there's, it's, IMimmaterial that the name, the,
the, um, the person has a number.
But even more than that, andthis again shows Elon Musk
and Donald Trump's ignorance that
you can have dependence on a,on a, on an earnings record,
so that you still needthat social security number
(23:25):
and that earnings record evenafter the person has died.
I mean, as I was looking atthis, you know, the last person
to get a Civil War pension,it was five years ago in 2020,
and that was because it wasa disabled adult daughter
of a Civil War veteranwho had, um, so, you know,
the daughter had been born,um, towards the end of his life
(23:48):
and lived a long life.
So it, it, again, it'sum, this has been very,
very heavily audited
and the program isextremely efficiently run
and accurately run.
- So let's talk a little bitabout specifically, you know,
'cause obviously we know Elon Musk
and Doge have been gettinginto to the running
(24:10):
of social security in a big way.
And you wanna say a little bit about what,
what the issues have been raisedand obvious since a lot of
- Them, it's, it's really,and I have a whole theory
and we sort of were touchingon it, what, what is going on?
But the, um,
Elon Musk has been looking,he, as soon as the, um,
(24:32):
after January 20th, theseDoge minions, you know, one
as young as 19, the,you know, the, the races
who got fired and was brought back.
They're, they've been allover the Social Security
administration and they,um, they were seeking
our most sensitive files.
I mean, these are, there is
(24:52):
so much they're doingthis in every agency,
but all of our, we, youknow, we have an agreement
with the government that we provide, uh,
the sensitive information to them
for a mission driven purpose.
And that is to, um, in thecase of social security,
to keep our earnings records
and our, our family'searnings records and so forth.
(25:15):
And in, actually, in thecase of disability insurance,
if you've even appliedfor disability insurance,
even if you haven't gotten it,
you have all your medical records
that the Social SecurityAdministration has.
It's got a lot of sensitive records.
If somebody's in awitness protection program
and has to get a new socialsecurity numbers, all kinds of
information, no one in thehistory of the program has had
(25:39):
access to all of the information,
and the only ones who've hadaccess at all, they'd have
to have very mission specific purpose.
And then they talk aboutit being sandboxed.
So it's, and it's very securely held.
It's always been looked atin, in a very secure way.
And there'll be, um, and so forth.
(25:59):
The, um, January 20th came
and the, um, acting commissioner,
'cause of course the, thepolitical commissioner had had
left the one, the, um, Martin O'Malley
and then Carolyn Colvin.
So the acting commissionerwas named by Trump,
was someone who'd been there for 30
(26:20):
or more over 30 years, was very, um,
had been in very highlevel positions, was kind
of the perfect person you'd think of
as the acting was notpolitical and so forth.
And she was very cooperative,um, until they asked
for access to everything,including the source code,
so they could rewrite anything in our in.
(26:42):
And she, I know her,
and I'm sure she wasvery polite in explaining
to them why they could nothave that broad access,
but if they couldexplain what they needed,
she would provide it for them.
And of course, what happenedwas the next day she was
sent an email saying she was no
longer the acting commissioner.
The person who was the act
(27:03):
to be the acting commissioner had,
was actually on administrative leave.
He was a middle level, um,
person at Social SecurityAdministration who'd been leaking
information and working with Doge,
even though his bosses didn'tknow that he was doing that.
And so he'd been put onadministrative leave,
he now was the new acting commissioner.
He was leapfrogged overabout 120 more senior people.
(27:28):
His one, um, um, qualification was
that he'd give Doge whatever they wanted.
And so that's who now hasall of that on top of it.
And he has acknowledged
that he's not calling theshots, the White House.
They have hollowed out the agency.
They, the, it's, uh, Dean,it's gonna sound crazy,
(27:49):
but it's not an exaggerationto say nearly a thousand years
of institutional knowledgehas walked out the door in the
last few weeks or beenpushed out the door.
People who'd workedthere 30, 35, 40 years.
And as a result, people who were, um,
the top people on cybersecurity, people
who maintain the website,all of them gone,
(28:11):
the communications people.
So now you know how SSA
issues doesn't issuepress releases anymore.
It puts statements on X.
That's how the public gets theirinformation from the Social
Security Administration,a for-profit platform
that has advertisements.
I mean, it's just outrageous.
(28:32):
But they have, um, decimatedthe agency. The, um,
- If I, if I could just back up
because I emphasize a couple things here.
Sure. First off, I'llstart with that last one
because it is, this has happenedwith a number of agencies
and I trust people knowX is Elon Musk platform.
So here you have governmentagencies that instead
(28:52):
of issuing press releasesthat are freely available
to whoever wants, Imean, to general public,
but also obviously to themedia, to to, to press.
That's what they're designed for.
You have to instead go to X.
And how they could think that'sjustified, how they think
that can make sense is just mind boggling.
I mean, you know, obviouslyYou don't even have
(29:14):
to argue it's a conflict of interest.
What else can we just call it?
But you know, the other point,you know, I think people have
to, you know, we're researchers.
We, we work with this stuff,you wanna look for fraud,
they could give you the d youdon't need the person's name.
You could, you know,here's, here's, you know,
here's the information, here's
how we calculate their benefit,
(29:35):
you know, whatever it might be.
And that's done all the time.
You know, and the SocialSecurity administration,
the professional staffwho have been there,
were perfectly willingto tell Elon Musk, okay,
you wanna look over a million files?
We'll give you the data,but we're not gonna
allow you in there.
So you have that youcould find information,
you really have no business finding out.
You don't get to know theirmedical history. You don that.
(29:56):
That's not your business. Andyou don't get to play with it.
You know, again, we have totrust them that, you know, I,
I've worked 35 years, whatever period,
you're not gonna change that.
Make it 15 years, you know, you know,
- That's right.
- I assume they didn't do that,
but, you know, there's no way
- To know.
There's no way to know.
And in fact, I was told, Idon't know if this is right
(30:18):
or not, but I'm afraid it may be
that social security hasalways gotten a clean audit.
As I say, it gets audited by outside, um,
auditors all the time.
And it's always a clean audit.
I'm, I'm told that it willnever have another clean audit.
'cause they'll have to be an asterisk
because for just the reason you're saying
that no one knows whethersomething's been changed.
(30:39):
There's no way to, to find out.
Um, which is it just,
and that's, that's sort of almost the,
the most trivial aspect of all this.
I mean, they are doing realdamage, even if they are, um,
you know, even if they hadthe most benign motives,
and I don't believe that they do,
(31:00):
but even if they did, itis a complicated system.
You to, to make changes, you really have
to understand the program
because you, it's not just that it's COBOL
and the language that, a computer
language that they don't know.
It's also that these peopledon't know the program
because you have to knowwhat order to put things in.
(31:21):
And it may have, um, one change may have
another change, um, somewhere else.
And they're talking aboutthis another thing that's, uh,
there's so much that crazy stuff going on,
but they've talked aboutre updating the whole, um,
systems within a few months.
That is the experts I talkedto that is almost certain
(31:44):
to cause problems with cascading effects
and could crash the entire system.
- Yeah. One of the things, andagain, they're mocked for it,
but you know, they use thislanguage cobol, which goes back,
I think to the sixties,you know, it's a, yeah,
- It's - An ancient, canmake fun of them for that.
But there's there,there's a logic to that.
And it, it's simply that
because it has been used for so long
(32:06):
and on such a large scale, weknow there are no bugs in it.
- Exactly.- And, you know, we get the,
he calls 'em super high iq,
I maybe give him an IQ does, I don't know.
But you know, that, you know, ,
we get the Doge boys in thereand maybe they are very smart.
I have no idea. But you know,
when you put in a newsystem there, the idea,
(32:26):
it's gonna run perfectly andthere won't be serious bugs.
I mean, it'd be great if that were true,
but know there are a lot ofvery smart people that try
working on changing the program before,
and they all backed away
because they realized they,they couldn't do it. So,
- And they, and there'sno reason to update it.
The, the, the concerns are there are fewer
(32:48):
and fewer people who know cobol
and they're, they're, youknow, they charge, they,
they're expensive becausethere are so few of them.
Um, but it, it's a system that works.
And, you know, I, I wasreading about sort of this idea
that, oh, the cool kids,you know, it's not the, uh,
program the cool kids know.
(33:10):
Well, it's, as you say, it's a program
that is operated for so long.
It's, it's, the bugs are gone.
And if you have any kind of new system,
they're gonna be putting bugs in
and it's gonna be cascading, um, problems
because they don't know the, they,
they don't understand the program,
and they're not taking thetime if you were gonna do this.
(33:31):
And they, they do itwith little pieces of it.
They have been updating thesystem and you do little pieces
and you test them, andyou have redundancies,
and you make sure before you turn one off
and turn the other on thatit's not that it's going
to produce the right results.
You can't do that in a fewmonths. That takes years.
(33:51):
And that's just that they're also making
all kinds of changes.
And again, this is, I think
because of the fraud on whatyou can do on the phone,
because they claim there'sfraud where there's not fraud.
And it's just creating chaos
and it's creating the opportunityfor scammers to come in
and, um, prey on a population seniors
(34:15):
who are disproportionatelyor subject to scams.
- Yeah. The phone issue was,you know, they, they said that,
and I think they backtracked on this,
but people wouldn't beable to set up their,
or change their, uh, directdeposit over the phone.
And of course, a lot of, almost
by definition we're talking about people,
we're talking about disabled people, many
(34:35):
of those people will havetrouble working on the
internet, and there's
- More fraud on theinternet. I mean, that's the,
- Yeah, no, and, and, yeah, exactly.
This is what I was gonna get to.
Elon Musk was runningaround saying that 40%
of the phone calls are fraudsters.
- Oh, yeah.- And,
and what the actual statisticswas, 40% of the fraud
(34:55):
is done over the phone.
- Exactly.- Which is like, you know,
like totally opposite.
I dunno what that's like one in a, one in
- One in 3,100 phone calls.
- So, yeah. So it just, youknow, again, you just go like,
he gets this number that, you know,
obviously he wanted to say it.
I'm sure Elon Musk couldfigure out if we sat him down
(35:17):
and explained, oh, it's,you know, 40% of the fraud,
not 40% of the phone calls.
But yeah, he just totallymisrepresented it.
And as a result of that,he's proposing his policy.
That'd be an incredibleinconvenience for, you know,
hundreds of thousands, maybemillions of people. Millions.
- No, and because they werealso saying that you couldn't,
you had to come in, um,when you're filing a claim,
(35:38):
you really had to file it inperson or over the internet.
Again, in person.
They're, first of all, over the internet,
especially in rural areas,there are a lot of people
who don't have broadband.
And the field offices couldbe mile, you know, hour
and hours drive, drive away,
and they're talking aboutclosing the field offices.
(36:00):
So it's, it's this sort ofOrwellian stuff where they say,
okay, people who work in the field offices
cannot work remotely.
They have to go into the field offices,
but by the way, we're gonna cancel.
We're gonna close all thefield offices, offices,
they've already closed regional offices.
They've created chaos.
Where the employees themselves don't know,
(36:21):
they find out about these changes the
same way the public does.
And the public starts calling,and they don't have answers
because it hasn't been vetted.
They haven't been trained. They,
the policies haven't even really been
very well thought through.
And so they keep reversing them.
I mean, it's really, um, as I say,
the most benign is thatthey're incompetent.
(36:44):
But unfortunately, I thinkthey're really trying
to undermine the system.
So you take your pick, is that, yeah,
- It sure seems that way.
You know, again, the abuse of the workers.
So, you know, again, theytalk about these people, like,
you know, they're living highon the hard, you know, I,
you know, we both don't makepeople work in social security.
You can make comfortable living.
You're not getting rich there.
(37:04):
You know, most of the peoplecould get much more money in
the private sector, butthey, they're, they're there,
they're serving the public.
They understand what they're doing.
And, you know, here's Musk comes in
and he just treats 'em like shit.
You know, like, oh, youknow, that was the policy.
Today, it's a different policy.
Oh, tomorrow it's a different one.
You know, and it's just,
- And it's demeaning and it's,
and it's the, you know, goget a real job basically,
(37:25):
even though these, these jobs are so hard
and really, um, not well compensated.
And, but people do it becausethey believe in the mission
and they believe in public service,
but they're, you're right.
It's, it's just horrible. Andon top of it, they never know.
They don't know from dayto day what's gonna happen.
(37:46):
You know, they're said,okay, fork in the road. Okay.
You know, there's the carrotof you can, um, retire early,
or you can leave and take,get a lump sum payment,
but the stick is, if you don't,
you're probably gonna be fired.
And those are starting nowwe're in this phase two
where they're huge number.
So you've got an agency that is, uh,
(38:09):
was already at a 50 year low
and is now, um, they'retalking about getting rid
of about 15% more.
So it's understaffed, overworked,
and it's just spiraling downward.
And it's really, I mean,50 year low is actually
an understatement because
what happened 50 years agowas the enactment of SSI.
(38:33):
And so before SSSI,the administration was,
was the social security program.
So it's, I think it's basically
probably the lowest it'sever been. Certainly,
- Just to be clear for people, SSI is
supplemental security income.
So it's it's an add on.
It's not part of the regularSocial security program.
Exactly. So that is ameans tested program.
(38:54):
And actually for thatreason, it requires a lot
of administrative staffthat you don't need
for Social security,the, the disability part
of Social security andsocial security itself,
because that's not means tested.
It's you have an earnings record. Exactly.
You know, they, they don't have
to go out and check your income.
- And of course, again,
because it's, uh, it's akind of demonized program,
even though it's areally important program,
(39:17):
there are all kinds of, you know, you have
to bring your pay stubs in every month
to show you what you've earned.
And if your family gives you
groceries, you have to report that.
I mean, it's ki so that it,
the supplemental securityincome represents about 5%
of all the benefits that go out.
95% are for social security,yet it's something like 40%
(39:38):
of the administrativeexpenses or SSI expenses.
So again, it gives you a sense of
how much resources are devoted
to administering that program.
- Let me get to somethingI'm sure is about
that use scares me to death, uh, bad term.
Um, the, the use
of the Social Security deathfiles in an immigration.
Yes. I, I, you, you knowmore about than I do.
(40:00):
I'm sure this one really scared me.
- Yes. So despite what therichest man in the world,
Elon Musk, and at the moment,
the most powerful man inthe world, Donald Trump
will spout about all thesedead people getting benefits.
You know, I mean, I can'tbelieve that Donald Trump on a,
a joint session to Congressthat was broadcast nationwide,
(40:22):
spent minutes talking about just lies,
about all these peoplegetting benefits, actually,
because social, the Congressbreezed down the nexts
of SSA to make sure thatthere aren't overpayments.
They are extreme.
This administration is ex hasalways been extremely diligent
(40:43):
in making sure that payments
of people who've diedterminate immediately.
So it used to be funeral homes
and families that reportedthere was a lump sum death
benefit that was putin, in the 1950s part.
The idea was to pay, um, funeral costs,
but it was also d an incentivefor people to report when,
(41:04):
right away, when someone,um, a beneficiary had died,
they spend millions of dollars.
The Social SecurityAdministration spends millions
of dollars every year, all 50 states have
what are called electronicdeath registries.
So when the death is reported,it's immediately checked out
and the, um, the information'simmediately transmitted
(41:27):
to the Social Security Administration
and benefits are, areterminated immediately.
So it's actually, they're extremely quick
about catching that.
And actually, there's aproblem where sometimes
they make a mistake andsomeone who's alive,
um, is recorded.
It could be that in the funeral home,
(41:50):
the person's filling itout, you know, a spouse
or someone who's upset, misunderstands
and fills out their own name
or their own socialsecurity number, you know,
where it's supposed to be thedeceased persons or something.
So a person who's living gets on, um,
is reported as dead.
And that is devastating.
(42:11):
That it is hard tounderestimate how catastrophic,
I wouldn't wish that onmy, you know, worst enemy.
It's a, because what happensis not only are your benefits,
um, canceled
and your Medicare, if you'regetting health insurance,
so you have no health insurance,
but that even though that, um, um,
(42:35):
death Master filed, there'ssupposed to be caveats
and so forth, they, they areused by banks and others.
And so your, your banks areclosed, your credit cards,
your your houses, um, is,
uh, put up for sale.
I mean, all kinds of things.
And it can take, you canget in these endless loops
of trying to correct it.
(42:55):
There was a, a case,
there's actually a class actionagainst Social Security now
because a woman was puton, um, inadvertently
was reported as dead.
And she, it took her monthsand months and months
and months to correct it.
And within seven months ofthat having happened, she died.
And her family believesthat a lot of it is
(43:16):
because of the stress and the horror.
I mean, again, can you imagineyou have no health insurance,
you have nothing, you can't, so
- This is actually whatI want to highlight.
You know, that, uh, Musk,actually, I forget the number.
I believe it was 6,000 people.
- 6,000, that's right. And
that's gonna just do the beginning.
- Yeah. And you know, so they,they recorded them as dead.
(43:37):
So as they understand it,
and who knows that they're accurate,
but they're saying theyhad identified 6,000
people who aren't here legally.
And again, we dunno whatstandard they're applying.
They had them classifiedas dead, which means that,
you know, they can't work,they can't have a bank account,
they can't use a creditcard if they own property,
if they own a house, theylose it. You know, they
(43:58):
- Lose their health insurance,they lose everything.
And in fact, the thing that'sso crazy about the concept,
this is to get them to,to, um, um, self deport,
is that you couldn't even do that.
You can't buy a plane ticket.
You can't, um, get a visafor, you know, if you're,
if the world thinks you'redead, you cannot do any of that
(44:21):
because it would be viewed as fraudulent.
But what the fraudulence isputting someone on the death
master file when youknow they're not dead.
It's, it's really cruel and horrible.
And, and it's, it's part ofthis administration, which is,
I think cruelty is part of the game.
- And again, just to be clear,we don't even know, I mean,
(44:42):
we saw how careless they'vebeen in sending people, uh,
prison in El Salvador.
They have not, thesepeople haven't had a trial.
They haven't gone through a legal process.
It's just however thenames came to Elon Musk
or whoever's calling the shots there,
you know, it was Stein.
They've decided these peopleshould leave the country
and they're reporting them as dead.
(45:04):
Now, they could be UScitizens for all we know.
For all they know. They,
- Well, they could be enemies of the,
and I, you know, they couldbe, you know, they're not,
probably not gonna do it to Liz Cheney
'cause she's too well known.
But you could imaginethey could do it to, um,
people they don't like,
or people who've registered Democratic
or, you know, who knows how they might,
(45:25):
and again, you've gotthese young guys, you know,
they might say, Hey, let's,let's do every fifth person.
I mean, how would we everknow? And, um, yeah, no,
- It's a very, very similar,- And for that matter,
that would be the worst, putting them
on the Death Master file.
But as you said, they couldwipe out your earnings record.
They could say, um, you don't have, um,
(45:47):
quarters of coverage.
You don't, you're not eligible for your,
the benefits you've earned.
So this is, and there is no oversight.
Congress is completely silent.
We don't know what these people are doing.
And that's what's, that's, I mean,
there are many scarier things.
The the idea of any of us couldbe picked up on the street
and find ourselves in El Salvador.
(46:08):
I mean, how, you know, that could happen.
How, I mean, we, you know,people probably saw what the,
that Tuft student, um, who was surrounded
by all these men inblack and whisked away.
I mean, she could have beenwhisked away to El Salvador,
and what was she supposedto do at that point?
Yeah. So it's, that ofcourse is much more serious.
(46:29):
But that doesn't minimize theidea that they can just, um,
undermine say, Hey, I don'tlike the way you look.
You're not getting socialsecurity even though you've worked
your whole life for it.
- And, and that's exactly whythese files had always been
very tightly held by professional staff.
And that's why, you know,you know the Biden, you know,
(46:49):
they have all these crazy storiesabout Biden was doing this
and Obama was doing that.
No, no. None of them ever tried.
And if they did try,probably have heard about it.
But if they did try, professionalstaff would've said no.
And if they for somereason have persisted,
I'm sure they would'vecontacted members of Congress
who would've stepped in andsaid, no, you can't do that.
In this case, you know, theRepublicans of Congress,
(47:12):
and obviously they controlthe House and Senate.
They're like, we didn't see anything okay.
By us. Whatever. Yeah,
- No, and it's, um, it'sreally unbelievable.
Um, what's going on.
And then in fact, you can,there has a, is a lawsuit
that has been brought, um, by a number
(47:32):
of the unions against, um, the,
against Social Securityadministration against
Elon Musk and so forth.
And there was, there have beenwhat are called declarations.
There's sort of like depositions or,
and there have beensome whistleblowers too
who have come forward andthey're really chilling reading,
but it's, um, and it'sonline so anyone can read it.
(47:55):
But there was, I mentioned Michelle King,
the acting commissionerwho'd been named by um,
Donald Trump, but was firedwhen she wouldn't give them,
or was replaced whenshe wouldn't give them
access to all of this data.
Her chief of staff filedwhat's called a declaration
in great detail about all of this.
(48:16):
And one of the things shesaid that really got me was
that the data's alwaysbeen held very securely.
It's gotta be seen on sitein certain kinds of very
controlled, um, environments.
But the Doge people took it off site
and they were looking at anOPM, they have no idea who was,
who had a, who waslegitimately had access.
(48:39):
Somebody walking by could look at it.
I mean, it's, and again,a lot of this is, some
of this is national security stuff.
If someone has, um,defected to this country
and gotten a new identity that
that's data you don't wantloosely, um, you know, others
to be able to hack into it.
And there, so the goodnews is there was a lawsuit
(49:01):
and the, um, plaintiffs gota temporary restraining order
and have just gotten apreliminary injunction.
But of course, Elon Musk
and Donald Trump, it's notlike they're so, uh, um,
sensitive to the rule of law and,
and, uh, the understandingof checks and balances.
And so I'm quite concernedthat they're circumventing it
(49:23):
because a lot of the Dogepeople are being embedded.
The, the, the, um, the, whatthe court said was that,
that the Doge people couldnot, um, have access to any
of this information.
And to the extent they alreadyhad, they had to delete it.
Um, but it's hard to knowwhether they're really doing
(49:43):
what they're supposed to be doing.
- Lemme just mention something.
I don't usually give financial advice,
but I'll get some financial advice here.
Um, people should, if youdon't already have a copy
of your Social Securityearnings record, get one,
get a hard copy, keep it somewhere secure,
make two copies of it.
Because again, we should,you know, we should hope
that they keep your records intact.
(50:05):
They've done that for, you know,
the program's entire existence.
But that's not unfortunatelysomething we could
take for granted at this point.
- And it's, it, I, I a hundredpercent agree with that.
And one of the things thatreally angers me is that
the law requires thatthose statements be mailed
to everyone age 25 and older every year.
(50:27):
And they're, that is the law.
That's, that is not discretionary.
That is a requirement of the law.
But during the George W. Bushyears, the commissioner at
that time claiming theydidn't have the money
for it, stopped the mailing.
Even though there are a lot
of other things they could have stopped
continuing disability reviews.
There are all kinds of thingsthey could have stopped,
(50:47):
but they chose to stop that.
And even democratic administrationshave not restored it.
And that's unfortunate.
But, um, you still can getthat either by going online
or you can write and, and get the record.
And I agree that,
and the other advice I would give
to people is political advice,which is to call your members
(51:09):
of Congress, your senatorsand your representative.
And I would call them every day
and demand that there be some oversight
of Elon Musk, so we know what he's doing.
- We should probably,uh, cut this off there.
But thanks a lot for coming on.
And you know, this is, you know, both
of us obviously think it'sincredibly important program
and you know, it's really crucial
(51:32):
that we protect and preserve it.
So absolutely. Thanks for coming out
- And expand.
And expand. A big expand.
- Yeah, we'll come tothat in the next show.
Let's, let's hope we have a time
to seriously talk about Hispanic.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- If you like what you justsaw, please help us out
by liking us and subscribing. Thank
(51:52):
- You.
- We have this incrediblybloated financial sector.
- It's a phony crisis that it
does. They don't have to be cut.
- We know how to get outof a great depression.
We spend money. If
we take a look at the typical worker,
they're not doing fine.
- Hi, I'm Dean Baker.
I'm your host for thepodcast, mostly Economics.
(00:27):
Today we have on our show NancyAltman, who's the president
of Social Security Works,
and someone who I could sayhas been working on social
security issues even longer than I have.
Uh, Nancy's work goes back,uh, many, many years, uh, back
to the Greenspan Commission in1982, which was the last, uh,
major overhaul of social security.
(00:47):
So when it comes to knowingsocial security, I think very,
very few people can claimgreater authority to Nancy.
So I'm very happy to haveNancy on the show here.
- Thank you so much for having me, Dean.
- Well, we have a lot to talk about today
and, you know, which is both good and bad.
'cause, uh, you and I both feel the same.
Social security's a great program,
(01:08):
and, uh, unfortunatelyit's threatened today
and perhaps a way it never been before.
But to start with, uh,maybe we could just outline,
you know, what you seeas the major features
of Social Security and why,
why it's such an important program.
- Social Security is reallyessential for an, um,
a society where people gettheir, they, their, um,
(01:31):
essentials through workwhere everyone works
and you need work.
There's no uniform, basicincome or anything like that,
because what social security is,
it's insurance against the loss of wages.
As I say, as long asyou, uh, need your salary
or wages to pay for yourhousing and your food
and your clothing and so forth,
(01:52):
you need insurance against their loss.
You can lose that income if you, um,
die leaving young children
who are dependent on those benefits.
You can lose that incomeif you become so disabled
that you cannot supportyourself through work.
Or if you have the good fortuneto live to very old age,
you lose your income if you retire.
(02:13):
Social security ensures wagesin those three categories.
In addition, you can lose your wages
if you become unemployed.
And we don't think ofunemployment insurance
as social security,
but it was part of theSocial Security Act of 1935.
And it's the same concept.
It's insurance against the loss of wages.
(02:33):
And Nina, if I can say onemore thing, it is extremely,
it is strikingly superior
to its private sector counterparts.
It's portable from job tojob. It's extremely secure.
Um, the it's plan sponsoris the federal government,
which is not going out ofbusiness and, uh, can, can tax
(02:54):
and borrow funds and so forth.
So it's strikingly superior.
It's one shortcoming is thatits benefits are too low.
- It's, you know, again, youknow this of course very well.
I mean, it's just remarkablewhat an amazing success story
Social Security has been.
So, you know, presidentRoosevelt support starts
this during the depression.
And at that time to be elderlypretty much meant to be old.
(03:15):
I mean, you're dependent on your family,
so if your family couldsupport you, you're okay.
But a lot of families,particularly during the Depression,
could support their, their aging parents
and the poverty rates were
through the roof for, for the elderly.
And today, I, I haven'tlooked at the latest numbers,
but the poverty rate for peopleover 65, some around 10%,
it's actually a little bit lower than
(03:36):
for the rest of the population.
So that, that's just anamazing success story there.
And as you mentioned, I thinka lot of people forget that,
uh, social security also, uh,
protects people against disability.
So you, uh, somewhere around 10,
12 million people getdisability from Social Security
and then also, um, forchildren of, sort of,
of workers that die young.
(03:58):
And, uh, again, it's almost comical.
Elon Musk was very upset
that you had four year oldsgetting social security.
The rest of us were going, yeah, that's
what happens when you,
unfortunately they had aparent that died young.
That's one of the benefitsof social security.
But you know, he apparentlythought he'd found
new evidence of fraud. So yeah,
(04:19):
- Exactly.
It should just shows hisignorance of the program
and the, as importantas Social Security is
as an anti-poverty program,and it is extremely effective.
In fact, when social security was enacted,
every statement NewMexico had poor houses.
And then those poor houses were people
who normally had workedtheir entire lives,
but in old age did not have family.
(04:42):
You could support them andliterally went to the poor house.
But the difference between that
and means tested programsis that insurance is to,
means tested programsare to alleviate poverty,
but what insurance is it prevents you from
falling into poverty.
So it's, it really is a extremely,
(05:03):
Franklin Roosevelt andhis colleagues really knew
what they were doing when they designed
and created this program.
- Yeah, no, it's an incrediblyimportant point that,
you know, I think isoften underappreciated.
Well, probably not underappreciate, so
unless it's deliberately distorted.
So when people talkabout social security as,
as an entitlement, as a benefit, it is,
but the point is people paid for it.
(05:24):
So it's just like noone would think that if,
if I was paying for, for insurance
and my house burned down, thatsomehow that was a handout.
I mean, I, I paid for the insurance.
That's, that's what social
- Security is, so you didn't get it right.
- Yeah, so, so the the attackson it are just, you know,
again, so I I I don't know
(05:45):
how much it's confusion versusdeliberate misrepresentation
because obviously if your intent is to cut
or destroy the program,
it gets less supportif you could portray it
as a handout rather than, no,
this is the insurance program workers
paid into it their whole lives.
And yeah, they haveevery right in the world
to expect the benefit for it.
(06:05):
- And that's, that is I think, part
of the undermining of social security.
And, and it's really had, I think,
an impact on disability benefits.
And that is somehow to makepeople feel they shouldn't
take those benefits.
That somehow there's something wrong
with those programs when actually it's
deferred compensation.
You know, people don't feel funny about
taking their salaries.
(06:26):
So that's their current cash compensation.
They, you know, if they geta, um, retirement through, uh,
their employer, there's, you know, you're
of course you're gonna get that,
that's part of your compensation.
And social security is the same thing.
In fact, until a few decades ago,
employers would claim SocialSecurity as a benefit that they
(06:48):
provided their workers becausethey do match the worker
contribution dollar for dollar.
But we don't see that anymore.
But it worker, you know,employers would be smart
to take credit for it andto, um, push to improve it.
- You have one more pointabout social security,
which obviously you know verywell, Nancy, that you know,
the, the benefit structure'svery progressive,
(07:09):
and that's, again, quite explicit.
So that, you know,
it's based on youraverage earnings over most
of your working life, your best 35 years.
And for a lot of people, thatis, their whole work might,
I mean, at least theyears that they credited
and you get 90% back of youraverage earnings on year,
you know, the cutoff it 1212.
- So yeah, I haven't looked at what it is
(07:30):
for this year, but it'ssomething like that. Yes.
- Yeah. So you get 90%and ob you know, better
or worse, there's a lot ofpeople in that category.
So they get 90%
of the first 12,000 peoplework part-time part,
they're outta labor force period of time.
Disproportionately that's women, you know,
they spend more time raising kids.
So disproportionatewomen in that category.
But then you get 35% on your next,
(07:51):
and again, I'm shooting in the dark here,
it's roughly 40,000.
You know, we used to knowthese numbers by harm. Yes.
So you get 30, 33% of thenext, let's say 40 or 50,000,
and then higher incomers,you know, they get 15%
of their income above, let's say 60,000.
Again, don't take me to town on that,
but it's somewhere around there.
(08:13):
So it's a very progressivepayback structure, which again,
we could core with whereyou have the cutoffs.
Should it be higher?Nancy's making the point.
It would be good if it werehigher. I'd agree with that.
You know, but you couldtalk about all sorts
of ways to restructure that.
But it's clearly a verybad, very progressive
payback structure, which is one
of the reasons why itkeeps a lot of people,
they have low earnings duringtheir working lifetime,
(08:35):
but even with their low earningsduring their life lifetime,
they could still, it stillgives them enough to stay out
of poverty, which isn't to sayit gives them enough to have
great lifestyle or anything,
but it's enough to keepthem outta property.
- Yeah. And it's, again,
and I think it fits withthe insurance concept
because, you know, it's sortof beyond behind the veil.
(08:55):
You don't know when you'restarting out in your career,
whether, you know, I mean, you can
speculate somebody's has higher education
and so forth, likelyto make a high salary,
but anybody can get hit by a truck
and, um, wind up, um, witha disability where they,
they just cannot supportthemselves through work.
(09:16):
And therefore having
that progressive benefitformula is really beneficial
for everyone at the start ofyour career. You know, and it,
- Yeah, yeah, again, that's,that is again, a point
that has to be emphasized.
'cause I've come across, I'msure you have many people
that really don't understandthat idea of insurance.
They go, well, I've,you know, I'm a lawyer.
I earn 200,000 a year, you know,
(09:36):
which would put you over the top
and you know, your paybackwould be relatively low relative
to your two thou 200,000 a year.
Because you're at the highend, you're getting, you know,
15% your average pay goals,it's real bad deal for you.
Well, maybe they're ableto work their whole life
as a lawyer and it ends upnot being that good a payback.
Well, you know, I'm in good health.
My health insurance hasbeen a real bad deal for me.
(09:58):
So I angry you,
- My, my hat's never burned down.
So there you go. And I've always had fire
insurance- .
Yeah, yeah. You know, so, so
that's the nature of it being insurance.
And you know, as, as you saida moment ago, I mean, yeah,
you know, you have a good job.
You, you know, it turns outyou earn 200,000 a year,
your whole working life, so it
doesn't give you that good of payback.
But there's no guarantee youdon't get hit by a truck.
(10:19):
You don't get real sick. I, youknow, we've all known people
that, you know, they're relatively young
and they have somethingthat happens to them.
And even though they'reon a good career track
where they would've hadhigh earnings, they don't,
because, you know, they, they get sick
or they were in an accident,
and you know, from the time they're 33,
they're barely able to work.
Yeah. Maybe not work at all.
They're gonna get a better, you know,
they'll get a good return ontheir social security benefits.
(10:42):
It's, again, it's importantto understand it's insurance.
That's the design. Wearen't making up words here.
It's actually called, youknow, uh, social insurance.
- Sure. That's yes. Survivors.
And in fact, um, one ofthe stories I I read about
that really struck me
and that I really like to talkabout is social security is
disproportionately beneficial
(11:03):
to those who've beendisadvantaged in the workplace.
So people of color, women,lgbtq plus community,
but it's actually importantfor, you know, I like
to joke wealthy white men as well,
because, um, there was astory that, uh, about a couple
did very well, were retiredin Florida, had millions
(11:24):
of dollars, had a very pleasantlifestyle and so forth,
but made one mistake.
They happened to put all oftheir, give all their money
to invest to Bernie Madoff.
And when they woke up
and found out what hadhappened, they were destitute
and they only had their social security.
And thank god they hadthat social security
'cause they would've been on the street.
(11:45):
So again, we, it, it, it's insurance.
It's there to protect you as, as you
and I say, you know, alot of kinds of insurance.
You'd rather, I I'd prefer topay for disability insurance
and never collect disability insurance,
but it is there ifsomething were to happen.
- Yeah. It's also, and,
(12:05):
and again, uh, obviouslyNancy knows this very well.
I mean, it's incredibly efficient.You made this point out.
It's, you know, superior to private plans.
I, you know, we've bothbeen in this debate forever.
I dunno how many times, you know,
I've gone up against the privatizing
and go, oh, it's just,you know, 1% a year.
If you have a 401k, oftenthey're considerably
that often the administrativecosts, they're often
around one half, even 2% peoplehave analyzed that closely.
(12:28):
So you often have a lot of plans
where they're very highadministrative costs.
But what's important tounderstand, they compare that
to the administrativecost for social security,
which is less than four tenths of 1% of
what it pays out the benefits each year.
So they compare the oneone 5% for, for their 401k
to the four tenths, and they go,
eh, it's not that different.
(12:49):
That's very misleading.
'cause let's say I put my $10,000 in 401k,
they're charging me one, 1.5% each year.
So if it's sitting in that 401k for 20
or 30 years, I've paidmaybe 25, even 30% of
what I'm ultimately gonna get out of that.
I've paid that to the company,to the financial company
(13:10):
that's administering the 401k.
So we aren't just talkingabout, well, even 1% for 4s,
it's more than twice as much.
Yeah. But even that's a big difference.
But it's actually much more,
we're talking about sayingit's more than a order
of magnitude different,which, you know, to my view,
that's one of the big reasons why there's
so many people interest in privatizing it,
because that's waste.
You, oh, I think Dogelooking to get rid waste.
(13:33):
Well, that's some serious waste.
But that waste is income for, for banks,
for insurance companies,for, for businesses
and financial industrythat would love to be able
to get their hands onsocial security funds.
So that's, yeah. You know,again, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- No, no, I was gonna just agree with you.
I mean, that's exactly what I think, um,
is going on right now is,you know, as much as, um,
(13:57):
George W President Bushback in 2005 sought
to privatize Social security
and I think security forjust that reason, that, so
that there could be, um, um,the Wall Street could make,
you know, about $1.5 trillion flows
through Social Security every year.
Wall Street gets none of that.
And they would like to get a,a big chunk of that, at least
(14:20):
for administration andbrokerage fees and so forth.
Um, but to George w Bush's credit,
he at least had a proposalthat he put on the table
and went around and talkedabout, and you and I
and others could debate about it
and show all the problems with it.
And it didn't even get a votein a Republican held Congress
because it was such an unpopular, um,
(14:42):
idea and such a bad idea.
But what they're doing now is worse,
which is all behind closed doors.
I mean, you mentioned Doge,Elon Musk's department
of supposed to be ofgovernment efficiency,
but it's really creatingenormous amount of waste
and inefficient and inefficiency and, um,
and opening the door to outright fraud.
(15:04):
- Yeah. Just to, to back up,
we'll come back to that in a second.
I just wanted to, you know, emphasize some
of the misleading claims thatreally, you know, often made,
but certainly made by ElonMusk about social security.
So one, he's, I don'tknow what's in his head,
so I can't say what he's convinced of,
but he constantly talksabout the fraud there.
And, you know, again, this isone of these things, you know,
I mean, it's more general with Doge,
(15:27):
of course there's waste, of course
there's fraud in the government.
You know, it's a huge enterprise.
How can you dish out $7 trillion a year
and not think there's some fraud?
And we do have, you know,
the general Account GovernmentAccountability Office,
which actually does do that.
We have inspector generalsat Social Security,
at the other agencies that spend careers.
(15:48):
They have professionals.They've been looking at this
for years and years and years.
And you know, in thecase of social security,
they have looked for fraud.
And they know it's very rare.
And you might have the data on that.
- I do. It's, I mean,you're exactly right.
You know, they're runningaround claiming all
this, um, fraud.
But this is another way thatsocial security is superior.
(16:11):
There's much more fraudin private, um, insurance.
You know, the American Academy
of Actuaries have done studies about that
with very widespread fraud.
And a lot of private sector insurance,
social security has been audited.
It's constantly audited.
It's got the Inspector General who again,
if the Trump administrationwere concerned about fraud,
(16:34):
I think their firstmove would not have been
to fire the InspectorGeneral whose job it is
to be looking for that.
Um, and so,
but there's also beenlots of outside auditors.
It's a very heavily audited program.
And what they found is that 99.7%
of all the payments areaccurate in full on time
(16:56):
to the right people.
And that 0.3%, even that most of that is
are, um, payments made in error.
So, for example, whereinformation gets is changed,
it's reported, but
because social security isunderstaffed, it takes a while
to get the information,um, through the systems.
(17:18):
And so there may be severalmonths of overpayments,
or there could be underpayments as well.
They're not fraud, butthey're just mistakes.
And with respect to overpayments,that money is clawed back
as soon as the governmentrealizes it's, um,
it was a higher benefit
that should have beenpaid. And in fact, yeah,
- I can give you a very examplethat I, I, I know someone
(17:40):
who was getting disabilityand her situation improved.
And she sent, she wrote to Social Security
and said, you know, Ishouldn't be getting it.
I'm able to work now, at least the
disability's notpreventing me from working.
And she continued to getchecks for around three months,
four months from whatever the,
whatever the period of time was.
And then they processed it
and they said, oh, okay,you have to get that money.
Give us the money back. Which she did.
(18:01):
You know, so they got the money back.
So, you know, so it was
- Payment, it may not bea loss to the government,
and there tend to be,
and this thank this is thanks
to the Republicans in Congress,
the administration wrongly I think,
or, um, uh, Trump administration'sprobably different,
but prior administrationswere much more diligent about
(18:22):
overpayments than underpayments.
Yeah. You know, and that's, to me is,
is shouldn't be that way.
But, but the point isthat the actual fraud,
and there is, as you say,in any program this size,
there's going to be, thereare gonna be attempts.
And in fact, even fraud, youknow, scam, they, they get
(18:43):
your money deposited from supposed to go
to your bank account, they switch the
bank account or something.
Usually people discover that right away.
And even though they mightnot catch the fraudster,
they stop the, um, fraudulent payments.
So just looking at snapshots doesn't
really tell the full story.
- Yeah. I remember this, again,
(19:04):
I've talked about this in thepast, but the Washington Post,
and this is the sort ofreporting that encourages people
to think poorly of social security.
They had a big front pagestory, jumped to two full pages
inside about how social security paid out.
And I'm forgetting the exactnumber or something, like two
or $3 billion to dead people.
And you know, any of us wouldsee that, you know, well we,
(19:26):
we have our nose of thenumbers, but most people don't.
I don't blame them. Theyhave other things to do.
They have lives to go, oh my God,
they paid out $2 billion for dead people.
And then if you read, if you actually read
through the piece, it wasover, I think five year period
and most of it was gotten back,
and the percentage of the actual payments,
and again, I don't havethe number at my fingertip,
(19:47):
but it was something like 1000th of 1%
of the actual payments.
Now, I, I've raised that people
and go, well, it should be zero.
We'd love it to be zero, butthat's not the real world.
Well, you know, do youwanna spend 10 billion
to catch 2 billion in, in overpayments?
Most of which you get back anyhow.
You know, that's, anyhow,
(20:08):
but that's the sort ofthing because, you know,
- There's also, and some of this also,
people don't understand becauseCongress, in some sense,
the, again, the concerns in Congress are
so concerned about fraud, thatthey have made the program
so incredibly complicated
that in some cases overpaymentsare impossible to avoid.
Lemme give you just one example,
(20:29):
and that is that you, your payment is,
the payment people get is for the month
before your social security benefit.
And to be eligible forthat payment, you have
to be alive every singleday of that month.
Now, I think that's wrong.
I think if you die on thelast day of the month,
you should get a prorated benefit.
You should get most of thebenefit. Um, but you don't.
(20:53):
So imagine someone,
or you don't, I mean, I'msure it happens, happens,
but think of a case wheresomeone dies on the last day
of the month, and thentheir benefit is to be paid
on the first Wednesdayof the following month.
Well, there might only be a day
or two between those two events,
and so there's gonna be an overpayment
(21:14):
because it, the deathhasn't even been reported.
That is an overpayment.
Now, as the government willfind out about that, you know,
two days later, and they'llgo to the bank account
and they'll scoop the money back,
or if the bank account'sbeen closed, they'll go
to the family, a grievingfamily and get the money back.
But that's one where I wouldargue there's no way it can be,
(21:37):
that's not even, um, an error
or careless, it's just you can't get the
information that quickly.
So just because,
and that would be a dead payment,
dead person getting apayment because they're dead.
- And, and that undoubtedlyis the bulk of the, you know,
not necessarily the last day of the month,
but it's someone. But, but
- Something like that where it's, yeah,
(21:58):
- Yeah, that's the bulkof the, it was striking.
And again, obviously you'retotally on top of this Elon Musk
and who know, again, I don't, can't speak
for what's in his head, butsay 20 million, he found a file
that has a hundred, what was it, uh,
20 million people over theage of 115 or something.
And he's going, oh my God,
all these people are getting checks.
And you know, again, if hehad talked to anyone there,
(22:21):
they would've explained to,this is an inactive file.
None of them are gettingchecks. They know they're dead.
And the reason why they don'tclean it up is it would cost
them millions of dollars to clean it up.
Congress doesn't wannagive them, you know, so,
so they have this file, it, it,
it has no consequence for the program.
It's not that they're getting checks.
So yeah, they have a file with people
(22:41):
who are 130 years old if they were alive,
but they know they're alive,they're not getting checks.
- And in fact, I mean,one, um, thing, I, I mean,
that's one thing where, youknow, someone, um, is born,
gets a number and then dies at age 10
and is never gonna get a benefit.
Um, it would be a way, itwould really be a misuse
of dedicated revenueto be cleaning that up,
(23:04):
because there's, it's, IMimmaterial that the name, the,
the, um, the person has a number.
But even more than that, andthis again shows Elon Musk
and Donald Trump's ignorance that
you can have dependence on a,on a, on an earnings record,
so that you still needthat social security number
(23:25):
and that earnings record evenafter the person has died.
I mean, as I was looking atthis, you know, the last person
to get a Civil War pension,it was five years ago in 2020,
and that was because it wasa disabled adult daughter
of a Civil War veteranwho had, um, so, you know,
the daughter had been born,um, towards the end of his life
(23:48):
and lived a long life.
So it, it, again, it'sum, this has been very,
very heavily audited
and the program isextremely efficiently run
and accurately run.
- So let's talk a little bitabout specifically, you know,
'cause obviously we know Elon Musk
and Doge have been gettinginto to the running
(24:10):
of social security in a big way.
And you wanna say a little bit about what,
what the issues have been raisedand obvious since a lot of
- Them, it's, it's really,and I have a whole theory
and we sort of were touchingon it, what, what is going on?
But the, um,
Elon Musk has been looking,he, as soon as the, um,
(24:32):
after January 20th, theseDoge minions, you know, one
as young as 19, the,you know, the, the races
who got fired and was brought back.
They're, they've been allover the Social Security
administration and they,um, they were seeking
our most sensitive files.
I mean, these are, there is
(24:52):
so much they're doingthis in every agency,
but all of our, we, youknow, we have an agreement
with the government that we provide, uh,
the sensitive information to them
for a mission driven purpose.
And that is to, um, in thecase of social security,
to keep our earnings records
and our, our family'searnings records and so forth.
(25:15):
And in, actually, in thecase of disability insurance,
if you've even appliedfor disability insurance,
even if you haven't gotten it,
you have all your medical records
that the Social SecurityAdministration has.
It's got a lot of sensitive records.
If somebody's in awitness protection program
and has to get a new socialsecurity numbers, all kinds of
information, no one in thehistory of the program has had
(25:39):
access to all of the information,
and the only ones who've hadaccess at all, they'd have
to have very mission specific purpose.
And then they talk aboutit being sandboxed.
So it's, and it's very securely held.
It's always been looked atin, in a very secure way.
And there'll be, um, and so forth.
(25:59):
The, um, January 20th came
and the, um, acting commissioner,
'cause of course the, thepolitical commissioner had had
left the one, the, um, Martin O'Malley
and then Carolyn Colvin.
So the acting commissionerwas named by Trump,
was someone who'd been there for 30
(26:20):
or more over 30 years, was very, um,
had been in very highlevel positions, was kind
of the perfect person you'd think of
as the acting was notpolitical and so forth.
And she was very cooperative,um, until they asked
for access to everything,including the source code,
so they could rewrite anything in our in.
(26:42):
And she, I know her,
and I'm sure she wasvery polite in explaining
to them why they could nothave that broad access,
but if they couldexplain what they needed,
she would provide it for them.
And of course, what happenedwas the next day she was
sent an email saying she was no
longer the acting commissioner.
The person who was the act
(27:03):
to be the acting commissioner had,
was actually on administrative leave.
He was a middle level, um,
person at Social SecurityAdministration who'd been leaking
information and working with Doge,
even though his bosses didn'tknow that he was doing that.
And so he'd been put onadministrative leave,
he now was the new acting commissioner.
He was leapfrogged overabout 120 more senior people.
(27:28):
His one, um, um, qualification was
that he'd give Doge whatever they wanted.
And so that's who now hasall of that on top of it.
And he has acknowledged
that he's not calling theshots, the White House.
They have hollowed out the agency.
They, the, it's, uh, Dean,it's gonna sound crazy,
(27:49):
but it's not an exaggerationto say nearly a thousand years
of institutional knowledgehas walked out the door in the
last few weeks or beenpushed out the door.
People who'd workedthere 30, 35, 40 years.
And as a result, people who were, um,
the top people on cybersecurity, people
who maintain the website,all of them gone,
(28:11):
the communications people.
So now you know how SSA
issues doesn't issuepress releases anymore.
It puts statements on X.
That's how the public gets theirinformation from the Social
Security Administration,a for-profit platform
that has advertisements.
I mean, it's just outrageous.
(28:32):
But they have, um, decimatedthe agency. The, um,
- If I, if I could just back up
because I emphasize a couple things here.
Sure. First off, I'llstart with that last one
because it is, this has happenedwith a number of agencies
and I trust people knowX is Elon Musk platform.
So here you have governmentagencies that instead
(28:52):
of issuing press releasesthat are freely available
to whoever wants, Imean, to general public,
but also obviously to themedia, to to, to press.
That's what they're designed for.
You have to instead go to X.
And how they could think that'sjustified, how they think
that can make sense is just mind boggling.
I mean, you know, obviouslyYou don't even have
(29:14):
to argue it's a conflict of interest.
What else can we just call it?
But you know, the other point,you know, I think people have
to, you know, we're researchers.
We, we work with this stuff,you wanna look for fraud,
they could give you the d youdon't need the person's name.
You could, you know,here's, here's, you know,
here's the information, here's
how we calculate their benefit,
(29:35):
you know, whatever it might be.
And that's done all the time.
You know, and the SocialSecurity administration,
the professional staffwho have been there,
were perfectly willingto tell Elon Musk, okay,
you wanna look over a million files?
We'll give you the data,but we're not gonna
allow you in there.
So you have that youcould find information,
you really have no business finding out.
You don't get to know theirmedical history. You don that.
(29:56):
That's not your business. Andyou don't get to play with it.
You know, again, we have totrust them that, you know, I,
I've worked 35 years, whatever period,
you're not gonna change that.
Make it 15 years, you know, you know,
- That's right.
- I assume they didn't do that,
but, you know, there's no way
- To know.
There's no way to know.
And in fact, I was told, Idon't know if this is right
(30:18):
or not, but I'm afraid it may be
that social security hasalways gotten a clean audit.
As I say, it gets audited by outside, um,
auditors all the time.
And it's always a clean audit.
I'm, I'm told that it willnever have another clean audit.
'cause they'll have to be an asterisk
because for just the reason you're saying
that no one knows whethersomething's been changed.
(30:39):
There's no way to, to find out.
Um, which is it just,
and that's, that's sort of almost the,
the most trivial aspect of all this.
I mean, they are doing realdamage, even if they are, um,
you know, even if they hadthe most benign motives,
and I don't believe that they do,
(31:00):
but even if they did, itis a complicated system.
You to, to make changes, you really have
to understand the program
because you, it's not just that it's COBOL
and the language that, a computer
language that they don't know.
It's also that these peopledon't know the program
because you have to knowwhat order to put things in.
(31:21):
And it may have, um, one change may have
another change, um, somewhere else.
And they're talking aboutthis another thing that's, uh,
there's so much that crazy stuff going on,
but they've talked aboutre updating the whole, um,
systems within a few months.
That is the experts I talkedto that is almost certain
(31:44):
to cause problems with cascading effects
and could crash the entire system.
- Yeah. One of the things, andagain, they're mocked for it,
but you know, they use thislanguage cobol, which goes back,
I think to the sixties,you know, it's a, yeah,
- It's - An ancient, canmake fun of them for that.
But there's there,there's a logic to that.
And it, it's simply that
because it has been used for so long
(32:06):
and on such a large scale, weknow there are no bugs in it.
- Exactly.- And, you know, we get the,
he calls 'em super high iq,
I maybe give him an IQ does, I don't know.
But you know, that, you know, ,
we get the Doge boys in thereand maybe they are very smart.
I have no idea. But you know,
when you put in a newsystem there, the idea,
(32:26):
it's gonna run perfectly andthere won't be serious bugs.
I mean, it'd be great if that were true,
but know there are a lot ofvery smart people that try
working on changing the program before,
and they all backed away
because they realized they,they couldn't do it. So,
- And they, and there'sno reason to update it.
The, the, the concerns are there are fewer
(32:48):
and fewer people who know cobol
and they're, they're, youknow, they charge, they,
they're expensive becausethere are so few of them.
Um, but it, it's a system that works.
And, you know, I, I wasreading about sort of this idea
that, oh, the cool kids,you know, it's not the, uh,
program the cool kids know.
(33:10):
Well, it's, as you say, it's a program
that is operated for so long.
It's, it's, the bugs are gone.
And if you have any kind of new system,
they're gonna be putting bugs in
and it's gonna be cascading, um, problems
because they don't know the, they,
they don't understand the program,
and they're not taking thetime if you were gonna do this.
(33:31):
And they, they do itwith little pieces of it.
They have been updating thesystem and you do little pieces
and you test them, andyou have redundancies,
and you make sure before you turn one off
and turn the other on thatit's not that it's going
to produce the right results.
You can't do that in a fewmonths. That takes years.
(33:51):
And that's just that they're also making
all kinds of changes.
And again, this is, I think
because of the fraud on whatyou can do on the phone,
because they claim there'sfraud where there's not fraud.
And it's just creating chaos
and it's creating the opportunityfor scammers to come in
and, um, prey on a population seniors
(34:15):
who are disproportionatelyor subject to scams.
- Yeah. The phone issue was,you know, they, they said that,
and I think they backtracked on this,
but people wouldn't beable to set up their,
or change their, uh, directdeposit over the phone.
And of course, a lot of, almost
by definition we're talking about people,
we're talking about disabled people, many
(34:35):
of those people will havetrouble working on the
internet, and there's
- More fraud on theinternet. I mean, that's the,
- Yeah, no, and, and, yeah, exactly.
This is what I was gonna get to.
Elon Musk was runningaround saying that 40%
of the phone calls are fraudsters.
- Oh, yeah.- And,
and what the actual statisticswas, 40% of the fraud
(34:55):
is done over the phone.
- Exactly.- Which is like, you know,
like totally opposite.
I dunno what that's like one in a, one in
- One in 3,100 phone calls.
- So, yeah. So it just, youknow, again, you just go like,
he gets this number that, you know,
obviously he wanted to say it.
I'm sure Elon Musk couldfigure out if we sat him down
(35:17):
and explained, oh, it's,you know, 40% of the fraud,
not 40% of the phone calls.
But yeah, he just totallymisrepresented it.
And as a result of that,he's proposing his policy.
That'd be an incredibleinconvenience for, you know,
hundreds of thousands, maybemillions of people. Millions.
- No, and because they werealso saying that you couldn't,
you had to come in, um,when you're filing a claim,
(35:38):
you really had to file it inperson or over the internet.
Again, in person.
They're, first of all, over the internet,
especially in rural areas,there are a lot of people
who don't have broadband.
And the field offices couldbe mile, you know, hour
and hours drive, drive away,
and they're talking aboutclosing the field offices.
(36:00):
So it's, it's this sort ofOrwellian stuff where they say,
okay, people who work in the field offices
cannot work remotely.
They have to go into the field offices,
but by the way, we're gonna cancel.
We're gonna close all thefield offices, offices,
they've already closed regional offices.
They've created chaos.
Where the employees themselves don't know,
(36:21):
they find out about these changes the
same way the public does.
And the public starts calling,and they don't have answers
because it hasn't been vetted.
They haven't been trained. They,
the policies haven't even really been
very well thought through.
And so they keep reversing them.
I mean, it's really, um, as I say,
the most benign is thatthey're incompetent.
(36:44):
But unfortunately, I thinkthey're really trying
to undermine the system.
So you take your pick, is that, yeah,
- It sure seems that way.
You know, again, the abuse of the workers.
So, you know, again, theytalk about these people, like,
you know, they're living highon the hard, you know, I,
you know, we both don't makepeople work in social security.
You can make comfortable living.
You're not getting rich there.
(37:04):
You know, most of the peoplecould get much more money in
the private sector, butthey, they're, they're there,
they're serving the public.
They understand what they're doing.
And, you know, here's Musk comes in
and he just treats 'em like shit.
You know, like, oh, youknow, that was the policy.
Today, it's a different policy.
Oh, tomorrow it's a different one.
You know, and it's just,
- And it's demeaning and it's,
and it's the, you know, goget a real job basically,
(37:25):
even though these, these jobs are so hard
and really, um, not well compensated.
And, but people do it becausethey believe in the mission
and they believe in public service,
but they're, you're right.
It's, it's just horrible. Andon top of it, they never know.
They don't know from dayto day what's gonna happen.
(37:46):
You know, they're said,okay, fork in the road. Okay.
You know, there's the carrotof you can, um, retire early,
or you can leave and take,get a lump sum payment,
but the stick is, if you don't,
you're probably gonna be fired.
And those are starting nowwe're in this phase two
where they're huge number.
So you've got an agency that is, uh,
(38:09):
was already at a 50 year low
and is now, um, they'retalking about getting rid
of about 15% more.
So it's understaffed, overworked,
and it's just spiraling downward.
And it's really, I mean,50 year low is actually
an understatement because
what happened 50 years agowas the enactment of SSI.
(38:33):
And so before SSSI,the administration was,
was the social security program.
So it's, I think it's basically
probably the lowest it'sever been. Certainly,
- Just to be clear for people, SSI is
supplemental security income.
So it's it's an add on.
It's not part of the regularSocial security program.
Exactly. So that is ameans tested program.
(38:54):
And actually for thatreason, it requires a lot
of administrative staffthat you don't need
for Social security,the, the disability part
of Social security andsocial security itself,
because that's not means tested.
It's you have an earnings record. Exactly.
You know, they, they don't have
to go out and check your income.
- And of course, again,
because it's, uh, it's akind of demonized program,
even though it's areally important program,
(39:17):
there are all kinds of, you know, you have
to bring your pay stubs in every month
to show you what you've earned.
And if your family gives you
groceries, you have to report that.
I mean, it's ki so that it,
the supplemental securityincome represents about 5%
of all the benefits that go out.
95% are for social security,yet it's something like 40%
(39:38):
of the administrativeexpenses or SSI expenses.
So again, it gives you a sense of
how much resources are devoted
to administering that program.
- Let me get to somethingI'm sure is about
that use scares me to death, uh, bad term.
Um, the, the use
of the Social Security deathfiles in an immigration.
Yes. I, I, you, you knowmore about than I do.
(40:00):
I'm sure this one really scared me.
- Yes. So despite what therichest man in the world,
Elon Musk, and at the moment,
the most powerful man inthe world, Donald Trump
will spout about all thesedead people getting benefits.
You know, I mean, I can'tbelieve that Donald Trump on a,
a joint session to Congressthat was broadcast nationwide,
(40:22):
spent minutes talking about just lies,
about all these peoplegetting benefits, actually,
because social, the Congressbreezed down the nexts
of SSA to make sure thatthere aren't overpayments.
They are extreme.
This administration is ex hasalways been extremely diligent
(40:43):
in making sure that payments
of people who've diedterminate immediately.
So it used to be funeral homes
and families that reportedthere was a lump sum death
benefit that was putin, in the 1950s part.
The idea was to pay, um, funeral costs,
but it was also d an incentivefor people to report when,
(41:04):
right away, when someone,um, a beneficiary had died,
they spend millions of dollars.
The Social SecurityAdministration spends millions
of dollars every year, all 50 states have
what are called electronicdeath registries.
So when the death is reported,it's immediately checked out
and the, um, the information'simmediately transmitted
(41:27):
to the Social Security Administration
and benefits are, areterminated immediately.
So it's actually, they're extremely quick
about catching that.
And actually, there's aproblem where sometimes
they make a mistake andsomeone who's alive,
um, is recorded.
It could be that in the funeral home,
(41:50):
the person's filling itout, you know, a spouse
or someone who's upset, misunderstands
and fills out their own name
or their own socialsecurity number, you know,
where it's supposed to be thedeceased persons or something.
So a person who's living gets on, um,
is reported as dead.
And that is devastating.
(42:11):
That it is hard tounderestimate how catastrophic,
I wouldn't wish that onmy, you know, worst enemy.
It's a, because what happensis not only are your benefits,
um, canceled
and your Medicare, if you'regetting health insurance,
so you have no health insurance,
but that even though that, um, um,
(42:35):
death Master filed, there'ssupposed to be caveats
and so forth, they, they areused by banks and others.
And so your, your banks areclosed, your credit cards,
your your houses, um, is,
uh, put up for sale.
I mean, all kinds of things.
And it can take, you canget in these endless loops
of trying to correct it.
(42:55):
There was a, a case,
there's actually a class actionagainst Social Security now
because a woman was puton, um, inadvertently
was reported as dead.
And she, it took her monthsand months and months
and months to correct it.
And within seven months ofthat having happened, she died.
And her family believesthat a lot of it is
(43:16):
because of the stress and the horror.
I mean, again, can you imagineyou have no health insurance,
you have nothing, you can't, so
- This is actually whatI want to highlight.
You know, that, uh, Musk,actually, I forget the number.
I believe it was 6,000 people.
- 6,000, that's right. And
that's gonna just do the beginning.
- Yeah. And you know, so they,they recorded them as dead.
(43:37):
So as they understand it,
and who knows that they're accurate,
but they're saying theyhad identified 6,000
people who aren't here legally.
And again, we dunno whatstandard they're applying.
They had them classifiedas dead, which means that,
you know, they can't work,they can't have a bank account,
they can't use a creditcard if they own property,
if they own a house, theylose it. You know, they
(43:58):
- Lose their health insurance,they lose everything.
And in fact, the thing that'sso crazy about the concept,
this is to get them to,to, um, um, self deport,
is that you couldn't even do that.
You can't buy a plane ticket.
You can't, um, get a visafor, you know, if you're,
if the world thinks you'redead, you cannot do any of that
(44:21):
because it would be viewed as fraudulent.
But what the fraudulence isputting someone on the death
master file when youknow they're not dead.
It's, it's really cruel and horrible.
And, and it's, it's part ofthis administration, which is,
I think cruelty is part of the game.
- And again, just to be clear,we don't even know, I mean,
(44:42):
we saw how careless they'vebeen in sending people, uh,
prison in El Salvador.
They have not, thesepeople haven't had a trial.
They haven't gone through a legal process.
It's just however thenames came to Elon Musk
or whoever's calling the shots there,
you know, it was Stein.
They've decided these peopleshould leave the country
and they're reporting them as dead.
(45:04):
Now, they could be UScitizens for all we know.
For all they know. They,
- Well, they could be enemies of the,
and I, you know, they couldbe, you know, they're not,
probably not gonna do it to Liz Cheney
'cause she's too well known.
But you could imaginethey could do it to, um,
people they don't like,
or people who've registered Democratic
or, you know, who knows how they might,
(45:25):
and again, you've gotthese young guys, you know,
they might say, Hey, let's,let's do every fifth person.
I mean, how would we everknow? And, um, yeah, no,
- It's a very, very similar,- And for that matter,
that would be the worst, putting them
on the Death Master file.
But as you said, they couldwipe out your earnings record.
They could say, um, you don't have, um,
(45:47):
quarters of coverage.
You don't, you're not eligible for your,
the benefits you've earned.
So this is, and there is no oversight.
Congress is completely silent.
We don't know what these people are doing.
And that's what's, that's, I mean,
there are many scarier things.
The the idea of any of us couldbe picked up on the street
and find ourselves in El Salvador.
(46:08):
I mean, how, you know, that could happen.
How, I mean, we, you know,people probably saw what the,
that Tuft student, um, who was surrounded
by all these men inblack and whisked away.
I mean, she could have beenwhisked away to El Salvador,
and what was she supposedto do at that point?
Yeah. So it's, that ofcourse is much more serious.
(46:29):
But that doesn't minimize theidea that they can just, um,
undermine say, Hey, I don'tlike the way you look.
You're not getting socialsecurity even though you've worked
your whole life for it.
- And, and that's exactly whythese files had always been
very tightly held by professional staff.
And that's why, you know,you know the Biden, you know,
(46:49):
they have all these crazy storiesabout Biden was doing this
and Obama was doing that.
No, no. None of them ever tried.
And if they did try,probably have heard about it.
But if they did try, professionalstaff would've said no.
And if they for somereason have persisted,
I'm sure they would'vecontacted members of Congress
who would've stepped in andsaid, no, you can't do that.
In this case, you know, theRepublicans of Congress,
(47:12):
and obviously they controlthe House and Senate.
They're like, we didn't see anything okay.
By us. Whatever. Yeah,
- No, and it's, um, it'sreally unbelievable.
Um, what's going on.
And then in fact, you can,there has a, is a lawsuit
that has been brought, um, by a number
(47:32):
of the unions against, um, the,
against Social Securityadministration against
Elon Musk and so forth.
And there was, there have beenwhat are called declarations.
There's sort of like depositions or,
and there have beensome whistleblowers too
who have come forward andthey're really chilling reading,
but it's, um, and it'sonline so anyone can read it.
(47:55):
But there was, I mentioned Michelle King,
the acting commissionerwho'd been named by um,
Donald Trump, but was firedwhen she wouldn't give them,
or was replaced whenshe wouldn't give them
access to all of this data.
Her chief of staff filedwhat's called a declaration
in great detail about all of this.
(48:16):
And one of the things shesaid that really got me was
that the data's alwaysbeen held very securely.
It's gotta be seen on sitein certain kinds of very
controlled, um, environments.
But the Doge people took it off site
and they were looking at anOPM, they have no idea who was,
who had a, who waslegitimately had access.
(48:39):
Somebody walking by could look at it.
I mean, it's, and again,a lot of this is, some
of this is national security stuff.
If someone has, um,defected to this country
and gotten a new identity that
that's data you don't wantloosely, um, you know, others
to be able to hack into it.
And there, so the goodnews is there was a lawsuit
(49:01):
and the, um, plaintiffs gota temporary restraining order
and have just gotten apreliminary injunction.
But of course, Elon Musk
and Donald Trump, it's notlike they're so, uh, um,
sensitive to the rule of law and,
and, uh, the understandingof checks and balances.
And so I'm quite concernedthat they're circumventing it
(49:23):
because a lot of the Dogepeople are being embedded.
The, the, the, um, the, whatthe court said was that,
that the Doge people couldnot, um, have access to any
of this information.
And to the extent they alreadyhad, they had to delete it.
Um, but it's hard to knowwhether they're really doing
(49:43):
what they're supposed to be doing.
- Lemme just mention something.
I don't usually give financial advice,
but I'll get some financial advice here.
Um, people should, if youdon't already have a copy
of your Social Securityearnings record, get one,
get a hard copy, keep it somewhere secure,
make two copies of it.
Because again, we should,you know, we should hope
that they keep your records intact.
(50:05):
They've done that for, you know,
the program's entire existence.
But that's not unfortunatelysomething we could
take for granted at this point.
- And it's, it, I, I a hundredpercent agree with that.
And one of the things thatreally angers me is that
the law requires thatthose statements be mailed
to everyone age 25 and older every year.
(50:27):
And they're, that is the law.
That's, that is not discretionary.
That is a requirement of the law.
But during the George W. Bushyears, the commissioner at
that time claiming theydidn't have the money
for it, stopped the mailing.
Even though there are a lot
of other things they could have stopped
continuing disability reviews.
There are all kinds of thingsthey could have stopped,
(50:47):
but they chose to stop that.
And even democratic administrationshave not restored it.
And that's unfortunate.
But, um, you still can getthat either by going online
or you can write and, and get the record.
And I agree that,
and the other advice I would give
to people is political advice,which is to call your members
(51:09):
of Congress, your senatorsand your representative.
And I would call them every day
and demand that there be some oversight
of Elon Musk, so we know what he's doing.
- We should probably,uh, cut this off there.
But thanks a lot for coming on.
And you know, this is, you know, both
of us obviously think it'sincredibly important program
and you know, it's really crucial
(51:32):
that we protect and preserve it.
So absolutely. Thanks for coming out
- And expand.
And expand. A big expand.
- Yeah, we'll come tothat in the next show.
Let's, let's hope we have a time
to seriously talk about Hispanic.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- If you like what you justsaw, please help us out
by liking us and subscribing. Thank
(51:52):
- You.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.