Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The stock market fall and the inflation from tariffs damage retirements and show the importance of Social Security.
These tariffs aren’t part of a total strategy to bring key industries back to the United States. They are vindictive and nonsensical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaAdYSrYQdk
Musk is either confused or lying when he talks about Social Security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVqrKteSvxs
Trump and Musk Social Security cuts are causing difficulties for recipients.
Cuts include attempts to stop people from scamming recipients and customer service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IFJIxDRd0E
“But less than 1 percent of Social Security’s payments in recent years were determined to be improper – often the result of an accidental oversight or change in benefit status, according to a report last year by the agency’s inspector general. That works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.”
…
“The degree of scrutiny by Social Security’s IG can be intense. One report issued by the office earlier this month found that a partner agency in Mississippi had incorrectly made a $14 payment because of a data-entry error.
Social Security’s inspector general was fired in the first days of the Trump administration, along with top internal investigators at 16 other government agencies. Although the office has continued to operate, it is expected to lose up to 20 percent of its staff because of budget cuts, Rose said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-doge-struggling-fraud-social-132603335.html
Trump and Musk are exaggerating the level of fraud in Social Security and are cutting it in a way that will hurt seniors.
Musk has unlimited money to spend on political campaigns, giving him great influence over congress members who fear Musk will spend money for their primary opponents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ErMIViLzM
Social Security keeps 2/3s of our elderly out of poverty.
Illegal immigrants are a net positive to Social Security because they sometimes pay into it and rarely get anything out of it.
Taxation to fund welfare for our society is not punishment.
Too many people don’t make enough to save enough for retirement without Social Security. We can’t realistically expect people to save enough to retire without Social Security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD2mpvz7Efk
“”Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/05/dead-people-arent-bankrupting-us/
“contrary to what Musk claimed, tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse” cannot possibly generate enough savings to eliminate the annual budget deficit, which was nearly $2 trillion in fiscal year 2024, let alone reduce the ever-climbing national debt, which currently exceeds $36 trillion, including $29 trillion in debt held by the public.”
…
“Even if Musk succeeds in curtailing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” there is only so much he can accomplish by focusing on “driving change through executive action based on existing legislation,” which is how he described his agenda last November. Any serious attempt to reduce federal borrowing will require new legislation that addresses the main drivers of federal spending, including Social Security, Medicare, and the military budget. But the platform on which Trump ran takes all those things off the table while promising pricey policies that will only exacerbate the problem that Musk decries.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/12/elon-musk-implausibly-claims-competence-and-caring-can-cut-the-federal-budget-deficit-in-half/
Popular pundit says Social Security is a bad idea while apparently understanding very little about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pefGtjeeo