From Social Security to Food Benefits, It’s Welfar

From Social Security to Food Benefits, It’s Welfare Gone Wild
New revelations suggest just how badly the broken system busts budgets.


The numbers are in, and the news is bad: our public benefits system has gone to rack and ruin. From Social Security to food programs and other pillars of the welfare state, waste, fraud, and abuse is rampant.

Take disability payments. According to an Inspector General’s report obtained by Pajamas Media, the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance program (OASDI) has provided significant benefits to people who should not have them — including the dead. A newly commissioned audit reveals that more than 2,900 dead people may have received more than $23 million in Social Security disability insurance payments. As detailed in the IG’s report,

4,699 beneficiaries remained in suspended pay status despite the death information on their Numident ["Numerical Identification System," the Social Security Administration's (SSA's) file on an individual.] We estimate 2,976 of these beneficiaries were improperly paid approximately $23.8 million.

And 157 people whose benefits had been terminated were still paid more than $300,000. The IG even concluded that the personal information of 2,715 beneficiaries was at risk of being released to the public. What’s to blame? According to the IG,

SSA did not have adequate controls to identify and timely resolve discrepancies between the Numident and MBR [Master Beneficiary Record].

Bureaucracy, its own excuse, strikes again. As of Feb. 2009, the report goes on to note, there were also more than 6,000 people on the books whose benefits had been suspended, and whom the SSA knew were dead. And in nearly half of the cases, someone had been receiving payments for people who were dead.

[Mongo53]

The Disability Payments have become an absolute joke, well joke is poor phrasing, because if people really knew what was going they would never laugh.

Expanding several times, since the 80's, by guess who, (who else, the Democrats) it went from having provisions for subsistence for severely disable with no hope of supporting themselves to big payments for slightest argument of having a disability.

Parents are gambling away tons of money they get by taking their kids to a whore psychologist that will diagnose their kids with learning disabilities and suddenly they get lifetime payments.

And a whole cottage industry in law and medicine has cropped up to help people get free money from the government, or more accurately the hard working tax payers.

But tomorrow you can count on nhboy posting some cut and paste from a leftist propaganda site telling us that any attempt to reform Social Security to eliminate the fraud/waste/abuse, is actually an attempt to gut the program and starve old people.