“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.
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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.