BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
FIRST things first, NOT MY vp vance has to lighten up on the Maybelline, he's looking way too Goth and is ruining the look for true Goths!!!! Just saying, ya know? But back to one of a plethora of issues at hand.NOT MY vp vance continues to show he is as stupid and ignorant and a compulsive liar as NOT MY pres musk and NOT MY pres drumpf / trump by repeating the lies about the "problems" at Social Security. From the Washington Post and a very good video interview from Democracy Now!.....
The vice president falsely claims that 40 percent of calls to a retirement program involve fraud.
“You look at people who are 150 years old who are fraudulently collecting Social Security payments. You see our Social Security system — 40 percent of the people who are calling are actually committing fraud. That means the 60 percent who need their Social Security checks are waiting in line.”
In the lexicon of the second Trump administration, “fraud” often translates to “programs we dislike.” The administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development based on specious examples of alleged fraud.
Now, we would be the first to admit that foreign aid is an easy target for disdain, as many people dramatically overestimate how much money the United States distributes to other countries. But Social Security is one of the most beloved government programs in the U.S. Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint the administration is using to target government agencies for cutbacks, offered no suggestions for cutting Social Security, despite efforts by Kamala Harris’s campaign to claim as much.
So why is the Trump administration attacking Social Security as being fraudulent? As Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Social Security is 22 percent of the federal budget — and that’s more than 20 times the funds spent on foreign aid.
But administration officials are going to have to come up with better lines than this — both of which have been debunked by the Social Security Administration itself.
The Facts
First, a quick refresher. Social Security was created in response to the pervasive poverty during the Great Depression. It is designed to provide workers with a basic level of income in retirement, as well as disability pay and life insurance while they work.
About 80 percent of the 68 million beneficiaries are retired workers and their dependents; the rest are disabled workers or survivors. The benefits are progressive, meaning lower-income workers get a relatively better deal than higher-income workers; however, workers making above a certain salary ($176,100 in 2025) don’t have to pay as much of their income into the system, though their benefits are capped too. (About 6 percent of workers earn above the taxable maximum.)
About 96 percent of workers must pay a certain amount of their paycheck, generally 6.2 percent. That amount is matched by their employers, for a total tax of 12.4 percent. (Some state and local workers don’t participate in Social Security.)
The benefits are inflation-adjusted after initial receipt, a feature that is almost impossible to find in the U.S. annuity market. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Because Social Security was not prefunded, it depends heavily on the contributions of current workers. The baby-boom generation (people born between 1946 and 1964) will have fully hit retirement age by 2031, reducing the number of workers per retiree. Meanwhile, before the coronavirus pandemic, people had been living longer and thus will collect benefits longer, while people are not having as many children, which limits the pool of new workers.
All of that means that there is a crunch coming in less than 10 years. If Congress does not act to either raise revenue or change benefits — both politically perilous positions — then benefits would automatically be cut by 23 percent in 2033. The administration appears to be looking for ways to find savings through the shortcut of exposing supposed fraud.
Trump, in his speech to Congress last month, also claimed that people as old as 150 years had been getting benefits. But The Washington Post had reported in February that this is largely a coding issue. The Social Security Administration (SSA) maintains its databases using COBOL, a nearly 70-year-old computer programming language that doesn’t have a standardized way to store and work with dates. Often a default date is chosen, most commonly May 20, 1875, if no birth date is known.
Moreover, SSA had announced in 2022 that benefits automatically cut off when someone reaches 115 years of age. So it is simply impossible for “people who are 150 years old who are fraudulently collecting Social Security payments,” as Vance put it.
But notice the pattern: The Post debunked it in February, Trump repeated it anyway in a major speech in March, where it was debunked again, and then Vance repeated it one more time in April. Officials presumably believe repetition of falsehoods will make them sound more real.
As for Vance’s claim that 40 percent of the people who are calling Social Security are committing fraud, that is an absurdity on its face — the kind of twisted logic that turns up at the end of a long game of telephone tag. Vance echoed a statement made by billionaire Elon Musk, when he was campaigning on behalf of a conservative judicial candidate in Wisconsin on March 30. Like Vance, Musk said 40 percent of the calls to Social Security were fraudulent.
In a March 28 interview on Fox News, Aram Moghaddassi, a DOGE engineer, had given a slightly more nuanced version: “At Social Security, one of the first things that we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct-deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40 percent of the calls that they get are from fraudsters.”
But here’s what the Social Security Administration actually said on March 12: “Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information.” As a result, SSA said it would begin requiring people to change bank account information either in person or with two-factor authentication on the Social Security website.
The only thing similar to Vance’s statement is the use of 40 percent. Just simple math shows that the percentage of calls to the agency that involve Social Security direct-deposit fraud is minuscule. The Social Security Administration receives about 80 million calls a year on its national 800 number, handling all sorts of queries. For Vance to be right, 32 million calls would need to be fraudulent efforts to divert direct-deposit payments.
A 2012 audit by the SSA inspector general only identified, over an 11-month period, 19,000 reports of unauthorized changes to a direct-deposit account or a suspected attempt to make an unauthorized change. The inspector general interviewed 29 beneficiaries who did not authorize the changes. It turned out that over 30 percent of those frauds originated through the agency’s 800 number, which is roughly similar to the SSA’s statement of about 40 percent. Most of the rest took place at a financial institution, as almost half of the people interviewed reported they gave up private information to someone who called and falsely claimed the Social Security beneficiary had won a lottery. As a result of the report, SSA tightened procedures.
Note that one-third of 19,000 reports (about 6,000) is a minuscule percentage of 80 million calls (which is also what the agency handled in 2012). A White House official said an internal, unreleased study by the SSA’s call center operations team found that, since 2023, over 40 percent of all direct-deposit change request calls they received came from fraudulent callers. The official was unable to say how many calls Social Security receives a year to change direct-deposit information.
In March, Leland Dudek, the agency’s acting commissioner, told reporters that the agency loses $100 million a year to direct-deposit fraud. That sounds like a lot of money, but Social Security doles out $1.6 trillion in benefit payments a year, with 99.3 percent of those payments made via direct deposit.
Put another way, only 0.00625 percent of Social Security benefits are lost to direct-deposit fraud, with 0.0025 percent (40 percent) via Social Security’s 800 number.
Asked for a response, Vance press secretary Taylor Van Kirk sent this statement: “Instead of investigating the tremendous waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government that the DOGE team has been valiantly uncovering, the left-wing media would prefer to try to smear the Administration and the DOGE team’s work protecting seniors from scammers and preserving Social Security payments for current and future beneficiaries.”
The Pinocchio Test
There’s a monumental difference between 40 percent and 0.0025 percent. But in the Trump administration’s scramble to serve up outrage and scandal about alleged fraud at Social Security, Vance went on national television and told a whopper. He earns Four Pinocchios.
Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him or sending a DM on Twitter
The Social Security benefits of millions of people in the United States are at risk as the Trump administration institutes drastic changes billed as “anti-fraud” measures, but which critics say are aimed at weakening the popular program and potentially laying the groundwork to privatize it. The Social Security Administration has already shuttered dozens of offices across the country and is laying off thousands of workers. At the same time, the agency is demanding people make more in-office visits for routine business. The changes are part of government-wide efforts led by billionaire Elon Musk and DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“They are destabilizing the program,” says Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and chair of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. “It’s really hard to imagine what they have in mind, what their endgame is, other than destroying our Social Security system.”
We also speak with Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic, who says Trump’s nominee to head the Social Security Administration, financial services executive Frank Bisignano, has a reputation for slashing costs and pushing out staff. “All of that is a pretty grim portent” of his plans for the Social Security Administration, if Bisignano is confirmed, says Marcetic. “The people that are going to be hurt by it are the actual Social Security beneficiaries.”
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
