“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.
Archived copies of the article:
I’m on disability and the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking that I haven’t been thinking rationally about this situation and that I’d be homeless if my SSDI suddenly disappeared or was clawed back. My therapist considers it catastrophizing.
Turns out my fears ARE rational, we’re just living in a completely irrational timeline.
Right there with you, I have family to fall back on but I still have bills to pay
I lost that option when I had to wait 2 years for my SSDI to be approved. 😣
Easy to say people are dead and collecting benefits when you are the one that marks them as dead when you know they’re still alive and will continue to collect.
I don’t believe for a second that people at DOGE didn’t do this on purpose a few times to have examples to point to.
The fact that there was a significantly large line and the agents overwhelmed tells you all you need to know about that.
This is just fuckin’ sad.
Conservatives get so up in arms about folks “taking advantage” of the system. When the reality is that there’s always going to be someone taking advantage of anything that can be taken advantage of. The percentage of the system being taken advantage of pales in comparison to those it truly helps. To cut off, or otherwise make difficult, the benefits to those that truly need it is horrendous, inhumane, cruel, and, to say the least, shortsighted.
To anyone in support of this and squaring it away with something like “it serves them right” - do something with that cold, dead brain of yours like thinking just a little bit.
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.
As always, it’s projection - anecdotally, the only people I have personally known to be abusing government programs have been conservative. That’s more of a quirk of “most people using government programs are poor and uneducated and therefore conservative”, but still.
Everyone is abusing welfare, so I might as well do it too, after all, I paid into it!
Basically their thought process.
