{"id":16726,"date":"2025-03-11T18:12:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T18:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=16726"},"modified":"2025-03-11T18:12:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T18:12:17","slug":"dead-people-arent-bankrupting-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=16726","title":{"rendered":"Dead People Aren’t Bankrupting Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“”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<\/a> 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<\/a> to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted<\/a> 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”\u2014an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report<\/a> from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/03\/05\/dead-people-arent-bankrupting-us<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“”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”\u2014an 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.””<\/p>\n

https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/03\/05\/dead-people-arent-bankrupting-us\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[674,135,1107,132,675,150],"class_list":["post-16726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-entitlements","tag-falsehoods","tag-liars","tag-lies","tag-social-security","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16727,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions\/16727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}