A quibble… The 180k is just for the states that responded, if I understand correctly. They suspect that the rate of fraud could be much higher in other states. How much high? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. I think they want to reboot the program to try to remove the corruption.
>> I think they want to reboot the program to try to remove the corruption.
A reasonable thing to do - in principle. In practice that many people applying at once is going to cause all kinds of problems and delays for people. No big deal to inconvenience fraudsters, but delaying for people legitimately in need isn't good. Forced reapplication 5 percent at a time would be better. Or maybe thats what they're doing?
I would also keep in mind that the 180k number is almost certainly inaccurate, if we go by this administration’s behavior during the DOGE efforts of manufacturing false claims of “fraud” out of benign circumstances as an excuse to tear down the social safety net systems.[1]
> Bobba [DOGE engineer] had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data. Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek [SSA employee] watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.”
You don't starve 41 million people even if you think there is some corruption, that's absolutely inhumane shit. Enemy of humanity shit.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to just living in Dunbar -sized groups.
If a hunter came back to the tribe and people start gathering around to eat and the hunter said "A few of you in the past have taken too much meat for themselves without doing their fair share.. I suspect. Nobody is gonna eat until we figure this out."
You know what would have happened? The village would have taken that hunter and thrown them off the cliff onto the rocks, because that motherfucker was a problem and a danger to the rest of the tribe.
The guy bringing food he personally hunted back to the tribe and trying to ration and apportion according to everybody's input & needs is the enemy? Terrible analogy.
Oh it was certainly no Aeneid, and I'm open to hearing a better one.
In the tribal societies I'm familiar with, hunter isn't a position of honor or something, it's just a job. The hunter is a tool, like the basket weaver or the primitive doctor.
The part about "their kill" is not familiar to me in the tribal way because that's the tribe's kill. The tribes food. The elder(s) would decide to ration, not the hunter.
That aside, screw the analogy. If you have 40,000,000 people on food rations and decide to withhold said food rations because you think some of them are misappropriated, that's some very stupid thinking. Only an idiot thinks like that. The only other person that thinks like that is a sociopath, one that wishes harm on said group. Either way, they're clearly a danger as a decision maker.
It's funny to me that 1% of poor people is "corruption we need to root out" but having worthless billionaires pay less tax than a school teacher is well and good.
If we're going to work out corruption, let's take everything the billionaires have and actually fix some of our systems.
Yes, because clearly this administration is very interested in weeding out corruption rather than making most people's lives harder so that the wealthy can have even more wealth. It's long past time to be accepting their rationale at face value. They have not earned trust, benefit of doubt, or good faith m
