Elon Musk claimed that his team found 150-year-old people collecting Social Security! He implied there were dead people being sent benefits, with checks cashed by someone else.
But no—the people getting paid are very much alive. They are collecting their own benefits. They’re not committing fraud. They’re just not 150 years old, of course.
Reports say that his group at DOGE is made up of fairly young people. What those kids don’t realize is that Social Security uses VERY OLD computers. They’re programmed with an old version of the programming language COBOL.
A bit of history. On May 20, 1875 a bunch of countries got together to create the International Bureau of Weight and Measures which established uniform standards of mass and length. Later on, the Bureau established rules for dates as well. The dates standard used a starting date of May 20 1875 to honor the creation of the Bureau.
Old versions of COBOL use that date as a baseline. Social Security’s computers use that old version. Dates are stored as the number of days AFTER May 20 1875.
So what happens if Social Security doesn’t know a birthdate? That field is empty in its records. Thus that person appears to have a birthday of May 20 1875—about 150 years ago.
That’s why the crack team of youngsters Musk uses found 150-year-old people in Social Security getting benefits. It’s all really as simple—and as stupid—as that.
You’d think that those bright MAGAheads would notice that ALL those 150 year olds have THE SAME BIRTHDAY: May 20, 1875.
But they didn’t. Genius Elon Musk didn’t. And, of course, STABLE GENIUS Donald Trump didn’t either.
Sigh.
UPDATE Feb 15
In the discussion below, there are questions about the baseline in COBOL being May 20 1875.
There are many different versions of COBOL. Early versions used the standards set in ISO 8601:2004. Here’s the relevant info for that version from the Wikipedia link:
The standard uses the Gregorian calendar, which "serves as an international standard for civil use".[
ISO 8601:2004 fixes a reference calendar date to the Gregorian calendar of 20 May 1875 as the date the Convention du Mètre (Metre Convention) was signed in Paris (the explicit reference date was removed in ISO 8601-1:2019). However, ISO calendar dates before the convention are still compatible with the Gregorian calendar all the way back to the official introduction of the Gregorian calendar on 15 October 1582.
So what I posted was correct. (You doubters! I fart in your general direction!) The date was removed in later versions of the ISO standard. And it’s understandable that COBOL programmers didn’t know or didn’t remember this obscure fact. The information isn’t spelled out explicitly in the COBOL programming language—it’s simply part of the standard ISO definition used in the early versions of COBOL.
Since SS stores your birth date as the number of days after the base date of 5/20/1875, when SS calculates your age it subtracts your birth date from today’s date. If your birth date is blank in the database, it shows as 5/20/1875 in the calculation. Thus you’re almost 150 years old. It’s not that COBOL itself has that info—it’s that the Gregorian calendar used by COBOL works that way.
Also, probably the people Musk found are NOT actually getting benefits. They’re in the database, but SS has security methods to make sure that people who seem to be too old do not get benefits. I think the age limit is 114, but I’m not sure. I’m too lazy today to check.
Many employed undocumented immigrants have fake Social Security numbers. They pay INTO SS but will never get payments FROM SS. SS welcomes their money. No one ever complains about that.
UPDATE Feb 17
There’s more information about the main point—that none of these people are getting paid benefits from Social Security.
Here’s a table of people with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 people are getting benefits and are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by Musk.
More than 50 million people are getting benefits. So those 99 and older getting benefits are two-tenths of one percent of the recipients—basically a rounding error. More than 90,000 people in the US are over 99 years old. That proves there’s no significant fraud.
And there’s also this Report showing an investigation done in July 2023 of people listed in the database as being over 100 years old but not having any corresponding death records showing up. Obviously SS is aware of the database problems and is working to fix them.
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