Why the Protestant Church Needs Another Ninety-Five Theses

[Stargazer]

21 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Also stargazer: “Ofcourse if we cut off the SSA out checks going out to the 16million people aged 115 and over, ”

Sure you didn’t. 

Look, the SSA was doing its own investigations about dead people getting checks, finding them, and cutting them off. Before DOGE. Do we know how many of those were 115+ years old? No word so far. But no word so far doesn't mean it isn't or wasn't happening. You're implying I claimed that 16 million 115+ are receiving checks. I did not. Perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote. I don't know the number. Neither do you. There shouldn't be any. It would be nice if there were none. But the two pilot programs that have been run recently in a sample of states found $30 million and $41 million being paid to dead people. 

The problem is, the "lie" that The Nehor speaks of is something he believes is a lie. The lie appears to be what you implied that 16 million dead people are receiving social security checks. The claim, as I understand it, is that many of them may be receiving such money. SSA believes it has cut off those who were 115+ years old. Has it? It seems to not know about a lot when it comes to its data, if it finds tens of millions going out to non-alive people.

The main objection here is that anyone is looking for this kind of thing in the first place -- if that someone is the current administration. Too bad nobody really cared under the previous administration.

 

Edited March 16 by Stargazer

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Look, the SSA was doing its own investigations about dead people getting checks, finding them, and cutting them off….Do we know how many of those were 115+ years old? No word so far.

They stated no one was receiving benefits automatically if over 115 in the quotes I provided already.

 There is a manual process of getting exceptions by actually proving someone is still alive at 115 (see the embedded link in the quote below).  So if you say they haven’t said a word, it appears you think they are lying or somehow interpret them saying no one is automatically getting them as “no word”.

Cross checking that Medicare is being used by the Individual is, imo, an intelligent way of showing evidence of life for younger than age 115.

Quote

 To catch any deaths that may have escaped reporting, SSA regularly checks to be sure its oldest beneficiaries are using their Medicare benefits — if not, they verify that the beneficiary is still alive. And in the extremely rare cases where benefits are paid to people over 100 years old, SSA has a policy to stop payments by age 115.

Just for fyi:

Quote

Only 0.1 percent of Social Security benefits are paid to people over 100 years old…..These numbers [being used incorrectly to assume fraud or potential of fraud] appear to be drawn from SSA’s Numident database, a record of every Social Security number application since the program started. The Numident typically does not contain death dates for people born before 1920 — before Social Security was established and long before electronic records were kept. A 2023 OIG report explains that “almost none” of the people born before 1920 in this dataset are being paid benefits. As a result, SSA explained that adding death dates to these very old records would be “costly to implement [and] would be of little benefit.”

Removed political commentary 

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/setting-the-record-straight-on-social-security

Given there are likely less than 100 people alive in the US over the age of 115, the idea of a record falling through the cracks and continuing to be paid after the recipient is 115 seems extraordinarily unlikely and easily proven.  Simply use the actual SS benefit database (Master Beneficiary Record) and not the Numident one, which has a different purpose if I understand correctly (tracks numbers, earnings, etc, but does not pay out)

Added:

Quote

“[The Social Security Administration] needs to enhance its policy and controls to identify deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status and ensure technicians take appropriate action to record correct death information on their records,” the report said. 

The audit said maintaining better death data would help prevent identity fraud, though the inspector general “did not identify specific instances of fraud.”

Most American taxpayers would probably agree that mistakenly paying people after they died is unacceptable, no matter how much money went out…. the Social Security Administration agreed with the inspector general’s recommended solutions back in 2021.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-over-100-social-security/

Edited March 16 by Calm

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

Neither do you. There shouldn't be any.

Since there are supposedly 60-70 people in the US older than 115, there should be some.

Unfortunately this chart dividing up benefits by age clumps everyone 99 and older together, but since that number is 90,000, my guess is the number of those over 110 and older is relatively easy to manually check.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/benefits/ra_age202412.html

This is lower than the estimated number of such in the US, so the chance of fraud in these cases seems low.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/09/us-centenarian-population-is-projected-to-quadruple-over-the-next-30-years/

Edited March 16 by Calm

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Stargazer said:

But the two pilot programs that have been run recently in a sample of states found $30 million and $41 million being paid to dead people.

Given benefits are sent to over 69 million people for a total amount of $1.6 trillion, $41 million being lost by checks being paid to dead people of any age is not surprising to me.  That is a little under 0.0026% for the high estimate.
 

 While the OIG audit didn’t cover all the suspended cases, but sampled so I assume there is probably some fraud involved, there were no cases of fraud found by the audit.  Instead the report stated it was inspectors not following policy and receiving incomplete information and instructions (avoidable) and error (not always avoidable when using humans).

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-08-19-50800.pdf

Edited March 16 by Calm

[Stargazer]

48 minutes ago, Calm said:

They stated no one was receiving benefits automatically if over 115 in the quotes I provided already.

Yes, I hear that. But this whole quote Stargazer thing was occurring before you mentioned this (if I remember correctly). That was my belief at the time. He just brought up what I wrote before that. Probably. I'm losing track.

If all this is a nothing burger -- which could be the case, all in all -- then I guess the right wing has the same problem the left wing does about going ballistic over preliminary data. By which I introduce the Democrats' jumping the shark blaming Trump for that Washington DC air collision between the helicopter and airliner. And the airliner rolling over upon landing in Toronto. And the next seven aircraft incidents.

By the way, I am a social security beneficiary. It's half my income these days. I WANT the system to work properly. 

48 minutes ago, Calm said:

 ... it appears you think they are lying ...

Yes, it does so appear, and yes, I think they might be. Any employee can write an article carefully explaining things that are actually not the case. I don't know that I can trust what SSA is saying. CYA is a concept. Government has a problem with hiding inconvenient truths.

They say they cut off benefits for those over 115. But this is also the agency that claimed that it would cost millions of dollars to create a program to flip the bit on the "Dead" flag on records older than X years old, and that this would cost too much. Do they not realize that the code to cut off benefits at age 115 is no more complicated than the code to flip the bit on the "Dead" flag? They don't even need to create a new program to do that! All they have to do is ADD ONE LINE OF CODE to the monthly batch program they have to run anyway against the Master Beneficiary Record that writes the check they send me every month on the second Wednesday. That monthly code has to have some way to either check the birthdate, the dead-flag, or some other way to know whether or not to send a check! They can add the code to cancel benefit AND set the dead-flag into that one!  I am an old COBOL programmer with 26 years of service in Washington state government. I could add the code for them for free and save them the millions of dollars they think it's going to cost them to gin up a major project to add a line of code. 

I can think of one possible problem regarding adding that line of code. Maybe they lost the source code and all they have is the object code? Yeah, that would present a problem, and coming up with new source code would definitely cost a lot -- probably the millions they claim. But there are smart people out there who know how to edit object code to make the modification. ... but they can't possibly be that incompetent to have lost the source code.

48 minutes ago, Calm said:

Given there are likely less than 100 people alive in the US over the age of 115, the idea of a record falling through the cracks and continuing to be paid after the recipient is 115 seems extraordinarily unlikely and easily proven.  

One would think so, wouldn't one. But as I wrote above, what seems to be a simple database update wasn't being done, and the claim was that it would cost too much does not hold water. Unless their database is a complete mess, which wouldn't surprise me, given the obsolete database technology they are using. 

48 minutes ago, Calm said:

Simply use the actual SS benefit database (Master Beneficiary Record) and not the Numident one, which has a different purpose if I understand correctly (tracks numbers, earnings, etc, but does not pay out)

Added:

https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/people-over-100-social-security/

• About 90,000 retirees age 99 and older got Social Security benefits in December
• That's far fewer than President Trump and Elon Musk recently claimed
• Improper payments do happen, but fraud isn't the main problem

I'd like to trust these claims. Really. But trusting government... Looking at what USAID was shoveling out, and what the Pentagon regularly shovels out, and others, for things that either don't need doing, or are clearly fraud (900 dollar hammers anyone?), I find myself having serious trust issues. 

I seem to be getting my social security like clockwork every month, for the past 9 years. I guess that is what matters.

[Calm]

18 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

If all this is a nothing burger -- which could be the case, all in all -- then I guess the right wing has the same problem the left wing does about going ballistic over preliminary data. By which I introduce the Democrats' jumping the shark blaming Trump for that Washington DC air collision between the helicopter and airliner. And the airliner rolling over upon landing in Toronto. And the next seven aircraft incidents.

FYI, I am trying to provide info without the political commentary, so this kind of stuff is irrelevant to my comments and I won’t be responding.

I thought you still thought the SSA was not aware, not that you were referring to your initial belief.  Feel free to ignore my currents posts if you don’t currently believe the SSA has lost track of significant numbers of people who have died and are currently listed as living and receiving benefits over the age of 100 or even 115.

Edited March 17 by Calm

[Calm]

51 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

But this is also the agency that claimed that it would cost millions of dollars to create a program to flip the bit on the "Dead" flag on records older than X years old, and that this would cost too much

I believe they said it would substantially cost to track down death dates, not just assign them as dead.  Whether they are marked “do not pay as birth date is pre1920” or “presumed dead” doesn’t seem to make much difference to me, except the former is more diplomatic.

Quote

The Numident typically does not contain death dates for people born before 1920 — before Social Security was established and long before electronic records were kept. A 2023 OIG report explains that “almost none” of the people born before 1920 in this dataset are being paid benefits. As a result, SSA explained that adding death dates to these very old records would be “costly to implement [and] would be of little benefit.”

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/setting-the-record-straight-on-social-security

The key words seem to be “very old records”.  I am guessing these are records of people who died before more efficient records were kept, maybe they are records that were originally on paper that lacked death dates or dates were skipped inputting (error) when put into Numident, not people who died recently.  Numident contains all Social Security Numbers ever issued, but since they weren’t offered at birth until 1989 (is it just an option now or is it required these days?  I can’t remember when we got our kids theirs, possibly when we immigrated to Canada), I would not be surprised if a lot of the oldest ones had inaccurate birth info as well.  It would be a pain in the….  to track down a death date for a death that occurred before computers tracked them.  There must be some paper records that never got put into digital form.  I am assuming some form of Numident started in 1936 when they started issuing SSN, but AI says SSA records went digital in 1996…I wonder if they mean payments were made digitally at that time.  Anyway, whenever they started using a computer database, it still would have been quite a few decades of paper records prior to that which including missing death dates.  Hopefully this gets clarified.

Edited March 17 by Calm

[SeekingUnderstanding]

28 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

then I guess the right wing has the same problem the left wing does about going ballistic over preliminary data. By which I introduce the Democrats' jumping the shark blaming Trump for that Washington DC air collision between the helicopter and airliner. And the airliner rolling over upon landing in Toronto. And the next seven aircraft incidents.

Your problem, and one that should cause you some soul searching, is that you are equating left wing nut jobs spouting off on twitter, to the most powerful person in the world using his state of the union bully pulpit. In what world are they remotely similarly situated? 

[The Nehor]

A memo about the future of Social Security:

https://popular.info/p/exclusive-memo-details-trump-plan

And an exciting policy change.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-overpayment-clawback-100-percent-medicare-trump-doge-waiver/

Note that changes and cuts to Social Security Administration may make it borderline impossible to get the waivers that would help you. Also note the potential for losing Medicare. Hooray!

This is going to be bad.

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 3/16/2025 at 7:05 PM, Calm said:

There is a manual process of getting exceptions by actually proving someone is still alive at 115 (see the embedded link in the quote below).  So if you say they haven’t said a word, it appears you think they are lying or somehow interpret them saying no one is automatically getting them as “no word”.

Many years ago, my Paternal grandmother received a letter from the SS administration that she had been mistakenly paid for several months for her dead husband's SS, and that they wanted the money back. This came as a significant surprise to my grandfather. It took a lot of effort to prove to the SS administration that he was in fact still alive, and (as it turns out) it was another person who shared his name who had died and there was a reporting snafu (meaning not only did they want to stop my Grandfather's benefits, but also that benefits were being paid to someone else who was dead).

In any case, if our goal is to reduce fraud in the social security program, the thing that you do not do is to cut staffing. You certainly won't get better efficiency in a situation like this by using AI or algorithmic checking. And nothing that we are seeing in the actions being taken really gets to the heart of the problem here.

The federal government has (since 2021) been pulling from the Social Security reserves to fund the program (we are in a period right now where more is going out than is going in). On the surface, this can be manipulated to look like the Federal Government is paying for an entitlement. However, the challenge is that the government has for a very long time kept the social security surplus reserve as a line item in the Federal Government's bank accounting - and it has been drawing interest at the recognized rates:

Quote

What Happens to Trust Fund Surpluses?

When the rest of the budget is in deficit, a Social Security cash surplus allows the government to borrow less from the public to finance the deficit. (The “public” encompasses all lenders other than federal trust funds, including U.S. individuals and institutions, the Federal Reserve System, and foreign investors.) The Treasury always uses whatever cash is on hand — whether from Social Security contributions or other earmarked or non-earmarked sources — to meet its current obligations before engaging in additional borrowing from the public. There is no sensible alternative to this practice. After all, why should the Treasury borrow funds when it has cash in the till?

Money that the federal government borrows, whether from investors or from Social Security, is used to finance the ongoing operations of the government in the same way that money deposited in a bank is used to finance spending by consumers and businesses. The bank depositors will get their money back when needed, and so will the Social Security trust funds. In fact, that has been happening since 2021, as the combined trust funds have been drawing down their accumulated reserves.

So we should be quite clear about this - there is no savings to the Federal Government by cutting Social Security - except to the extent that they are not honoring the obligations that they created when they borrowed from the Social Security reserve. So should we be concerned about fraud? Yes. Should we work to eliminate it? Yes. Is there a real plan here on fixing these issues? ... probably not. Cutting staff isn't going to get you there.

Edited March 17 by Benjamin McGuire

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Many years ago, my Paternal grandmother received a letter from the SS administration that she had been mistakenly paid for several months for her dead husband's SS, and that they wanted the money back. This came as a significant surprise to my grandfather. It took a lot of effort to prove to the SS administration that he was in fact still alive, and (as it turns out) it was another person who shared his name who had died and there was a reporting snafu (meaning not only did they want to stop my Grandfather's benefits, but also that benefits were being paid to someone else who was dead).

That effort will take a lot more effort going forward with many SSA buildings being shut down and the number of workers on the phones diminished. It already usually takes hours on the phone to get through to someone. In some cases it may end up being impossible to fix in a timely manner at all.

1 hour ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

In any case, if our goal is to reduce fraud in the social security program, the thing that you do not do is to cut staffing. You certainly won't get better efficiency in a situation like this by using AI or algorithmic checking. And nothing that we are seeing in the actions being taken really gets to the heart of the problem here.

The federal government has (since 2021) been pulling from the Social Security reserves to fund the program (we are in a period right now where more is going out than is going in). On the surface, this can be manipulated to look like the Federal Government is paying for an entitlement. However, the challenge is that the government has for a very long time kept the social security surplus reserve as a line item in the Federal Government's bank accounting - and it has been drawing interest at the recognized rates:

So we should be quite clear about this - there is no savings to the Federal Government by cutting Social Security - except to the extent that they are not honoring the obligations that they created when they borrowed from the Social Security reserve. So should we be concerned about fraud? Yes. Should we work to eliminate it? Yes. Is there a real plan here on fixing these issues? ... probably not. Cutting staff isn't going to get you there.

All true.

Edited March 17 by The Nehor

[Stargazer]

Just going to do what I said, and stay away from the political side of this.