“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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  • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    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.