Breaking News. This Just In. From Lonnie Skum.

 

 

Please don't ask. I had no idea, even with modern medicine and science, that people were living to be almost 4 centuries old. 

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Where is the evidence?

There was no response to a request for more information from the Social Security Administration to explain what Musk is referring to or where the chart he shared comes from.

Until they provide some evidence that there are tens of millions of fraudulent claims going to dead people, let’s look at the large amount of evidence that there are not tens of millions of such claims.

Less than 1% in improper payments. Still too much

Which is not to say there is no fraud in Social Security. There is. And when an agency pays out more than $1 trillion in benefits each year to more than 70 million Americans, a rounding error is real money. Social Security acknowledges paying less than 1% of benefits improperly, most of it in overpayments. That’s according to a 2024 report by the Social Security inspector general. Trump fired IGs at multiple agencies when he took office, including the person who at that time was the acting inspector general of the Social Security Administration.

In January, just before Trump took office, the Treasury Department announced it had recovered $31 million in payments to deceased individuals over a five-month period, by using data from Social Security’s master file of hundreds of millions of deceased individuals, which is distinct from its payment information.

“These results are just the tip of the iceberg,” said then-Treasury official Assistant Secretary David Lebryk, who later resigned after his own run-in with DOGE officials over access to the Treasury Department payment system.

How many 100-year-olds are getting Social Security? Fewer than 100,000

So there’s more to do here, clearly. Over the course of the past 10 years there have been multiple reports looking at the millions of Social Security numbers associated with birthdays that occurred more than 100 years ago. But there’s no evidence of tens of millions of people over the age of 100 being paid benefits.

In fact, the Social Security Administration does keep up to date on who it is paying, and according to the most recent data, the number of beneficiaries 99 or older was less than 90,000 in this country of more than 330 million. But that’s in line with the 101,000 Americans who are 100 or older, according to Pew.

“There is not like a zombie apocalypse of people, you know, cadavers running around with social security checks coming out of their pockets,” the former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley told CNN. More frequently, he said, the agency has to restart payments after they are erroneously shut off.

 

Kinda reminds me of this: