“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”
That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
Archived copies of the article:
This is just fuckin’ sad.
Conservatives get so up in arms about folks “taking advantage” of the system. When the reality is that there’s always going to be someone taking advantage of anything that can be taken advantage of. The percentage of the system being taken advantage of pales in comparison to those it truly helps. To cut off, or otherwise make difficult, the benefits to those that truly need it is horrendous, inhumane, cruel, and, to say the least, shortsighted.
To anyone in support of this and squaring it away with something like “it serves them right” - do something with that cold, dead brain of yours like thinking just a little bit.
And often it just costs more to get rid of the last freeloaders than accept there are a few in the grey area. You got to pay people to check and validate each claim for increasingly elaborate fraud and costs for that go to quickly, surpassing the savings you achieve.
Pareto principle for ya, eh? Diminishing returns be diminishing.
This has long been a litmus test for me of an individual’s psyche or perspective - are you more concerned about the people freeloading, or about the people who need help and can’t get it? Which is the bigger problem?
So many other opinions seem almost downstream of the answer to that question, in my experience.
As always, it’s projection - anecdotally, the only people I have personally known to be abusing government programs have been conservative. That’s more of a quirk of “most people using government programs are poor and uneducated and therefore conservative”, but still.
Basically their thought process.
We call this rationalizing hypocrisy