“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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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.
Your therapist isn’t paying attention. It’s one thing to obsess over theoretical what-ifs. It’s another to have evidence that a what-if is being directly threatened.
I’m still trying to get disability. I doubt there will be enough staff left to process claims in the very near future. Again, very real possibility.
Fingers crossed for both of us.
Catastrophizing is a thing, but so is pattern recognition. In the context of current events, your fears are not only rational, but they may turn out to be critical to your survival if it prompts you to start planning for the train wreck headed our way.
My personal recommendation: if you don’t have a current passport, start the process like NOW. Being able to step out of the path of the aforementioned train if needed is a huge peace of mind.
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. 😣
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.
Pareto principle for ya, eh? Diminishing returns be diminishing.
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.
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.
We call this rationalizing hypocrisy
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.
