SS Actuary’s "Bombshell" Fizzles: Krasting Lays Egg
by Bruce Webb
Regular readers of Angry Bear will be familiar with bond trader turned blogger Bruce Krasting and his, can we say non-standard conclusions about Social Security solvency. Well he is at it again today under the provocative title of SSTF – Steve Goss’s Bombshell – What Could it Mean?. SSTF means Social Security Trust Fund, Steve Goss is the Chief Actuary of Social Security, and I am going to tell you what it could mean. Below the fold (because the answer is ‘not much’ and I hate to waste the screen space.
Those who choose can start with Krasting’s piece then return, or you can start with my deconstruction of the back story.
My version. Edward Schumacher-Matos, an Op-Ed columnist for the WaPo penned a column called How illegal immigrants are helping Social Security. An interesting piece well worth reading, I have no bone to pick with Mr. Schumacher-Matos. He sets up the story with this in paragraphs 2 and 3.
In response to a research inquiry for a book I am writing on the economics of immigration, Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and someone who enjoys bipartisan support for his straightforwardness, said that by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants.
That represented an astounding 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent of the trust fund’s total assets of $2.24 trillion that year. The cumulative contribution is surely higher now. Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone, Goss said.
First thing to note is that the initiative in on the part of the columnist who in the process of research asked a question of the Office of the Chief Actuary which has the final word on such things. And Steve answered using 2007 numbers. Why 2007? Well because the last time that Social Security took a deep look at this subject was during the preparation of the 2008 Report. And they found that the positive impact on long-term solvency from ‘other immigrants’ (i.e. illegals) was much larger than previously estimated, enough to move the actuarial gap a positive 0.30%, a VERY big change in the Social Security context and enough to offset other changes so that the overall gap dropped from 1.95% in 2007 to 1.70% in 2008, good news for those of us who were bracing for bad news in 2009 and 2010. The technical discussion from the Report can be found here: 2008 Report Sec IV.7: 7. Reasons for Change in Actuarial Balance From Last Report. What was the import of this finding? Well it significantly altered the cost of a long-term fix. And as Schumacher-Matos points out might have this think a little deeper about the actual economic effects of illegals who are more often thought of as drags on social spending rather than subsidizers of middle class retirement. But it didn’t really have any impact on the Trust Funds in the short run, FICA taxes were collected on illegals performing work that in their absense would have largely been done by legal immigrants or citizens who themselves were paying taxes (and because of the wage suppression enabled by hiring illegals probably at a higher rate).
Well as far as I can see the story could stop there. Columnist asks question of Chief Actuary, Chief Actuary supplies publicly available data mostly from the 2008 Social Security Report, columnist writes story pointing out the positive impact of immigration in this relatively narrow area of policy.
But that is not what Krasting sees. Oh no this is a “bombshell” dropped by Goss at the instigation of the Obama WH to advance the latter’s immigration agenda.
SS has been collecting money from illegal aliens for years. They will keep the money they have collected and they will not pay out any benefits (except fraud) in the future. So this money is “free”. I have often wondered how big the numbers on this are. Now we know. The numbers are enormous. Without the Free Money coming in from illegal aliens SS would look much different than we “think” it does.
Krasting maybe you should have asked. It is called the ‘Earnings Suspense File’ and while I didn’t know the number off the top of my head reader Nancy Ortiz certainly did when asked awhile ago, and this thing called ‘Google’ turns up all kinds of relevant results. This wasn’t the big secret you imply and its release was not remotely in the realm of a bombshell. But no matter, our hero presses on.
The WaPo had an article on this today. They had hard numbers (sort of) in the article. I was absolutely stunned that the source of this information was Steve Goss, the chief actuary of the SSTF. Some thoughts/numbers:
-Steve Goss does not reveal information of this significance unless he has a political agenda of his own, or he was told to.
Or unless he is asked by a columnist for a national newspaper of record for freely available public information for the purposes of writing a book. These aren’t state secrets, I have copies of the 2008 Report lying around somewhere and on my hard drive. Finding the resultant totals in the Trust Fund is not difficult. And this is where Krasting goes right off the rails.
-This information is an unmitigated disaster for SS. It comes a month after the release to Congress of their annual report that suggested that things had actually improved for SS over the past 12 months. The report did not highlight the fact that over $300b of assets held by the Fund were in fact contributions from illegal aliens. As much as 13% of the Funds holdings are tainted. Without this funny money the Fund would today be running substantial deficits. That red ink would force major changes in both payouts and taxes.
In what way is this money ‘tainted’? At least from Social Security’s standpoint. Social Security collects taxes from all kinds of people it knows will never qualify for benefits, just about everyone that works for wages pays FICA, and if you are a Briton who over the course of your career only worked 32 quarters or the equivalent of eight years in America, well then we take your money and say ‘Thanks’. Same if you are a stay-at-home spouse who only occassionally have taken employment outside the house, that five years you worked before the kids started coming along? Well that’s FICA under the bridge. If the case of illegals most if not all of the work would have been performed by legals or citizens, many of whom might equally not compile 40 quarters of eligibility. Would that money have been equally ‘tainted’?
Look we know that American employers have been exploiting illegals for their own financial benefit for decades. Now it turns out that that exploitation is also good for the bottom line for Social Security solvency and delays the time when income tax payers are going to have to start paying back the money they borrowed from the Trust Fund. And citizens and legal immigrants bear the cost in current wages not earned and future benefit reductions due to the crowding out of the labor market due to illegals. And for the long term health of labor maybe we need to press forward in an effort to transform illegals into legals either by naturalization or replacement so that every American worker gets every dime of Social Security they worked for. And yeah that might cost the system a few hundred billion over the next century or so. But somehow Krasting makes the jump from the inequity, if such it is, of retaining this income to claim that it is actually not income at all.
-Goss provided a range of the cumulative impact to SS of $120-240b (as of 2007). He said that the overstatement was $12b in 2007. Those numbers do no not add up in my opinion.
Danger Wil Robinson! Danger! Krasting math ahead. So BK does his own calculations and dismisses the opinion of the Chief Actuary in favor of his own calculated number of $350 bn.
I won’t (now) go into the longer-term impacts to SS of having overstated its surplus by $350b. That number is 13.5% of the assets of the Fund. I will say that this is a sea change event for how we look at SS. All prior analysis and all future expectations must now be revisited. I assure you that the results after excluding the illegal taxes will be will prove to be a major blow to the solvency of the Fund. It will change the debate on SS. It is that significant.
In Krasting’s mind. But how is this even an ‘overstatement’? Whether you peg the total at $120 bn or $350 bn, it exists and is legally available to pay benefits going forwards.
-We know that the actuaries at the Fund have been aware of the magnitude of this issue for a very long time. The question I have is, “What did they do about it?” We need to understand what this means in terms of anticipated future benefit payments. There are two possibilities:
(1) The Fund knew the money was from illegal workers but chose to close their eyes. For the purposes of calculating future liabilities they assumed that everyone, including the illegal workers, would someday get benefits. But they won’t. This would imply that the future liabilities of the Fund are much smaller than has been projected. This “good” news would have to be offset with the reality that the “true” assets of the fund are significantly overstated.
(2) The Fund knew all along that the benefits that are associated with these illegal receipts are never going to be paid and therefore it has reduced the liabilities associated with this to some degree. This would essentially make a fraud of all of the SS accounting. I doubt (hope) that this is not the case. To restate both assets and liabilities would create a very big credibility gap for SS.
“What did they do about it?” Well they publicly reported the results of their new analysis in the 2008 Trustees Report and then adjusted the projected actuarial gap by a massive (in context) 0.30% of payroll. The combined change of 0.25% of payroll (1.95% to 1.70%) dwarfed adjustments in previous Reports, (though matched in the other direction by the initial impact of ongoing recession with the 2009 Report). To equate the 2008 restatement with “chose to close their eyes” is ridiculous, instead everything happened in the light of day. At least if you were paying attention all along. Krasting then finishes up by proposing a couple of scenarios about how the “$350 billion” over-statement could be handled, ignoring only two things:
One the $350 bn is his number and not anyone elses. And two it would see that the ‘restatement’ was already done in 2008 with the adjustment in actuarial gap due to this new finding being 0.30% of payroll, which is a big number indeed when projected over the 75 year actuarial window. Sorry BK, those horses got out of the barn two and a half years ago.
Bruce
it’s kind of tragic that you have to answer Krastings insane ramblings, but that is the nature of the Social Security “debate.”
I in no way disagree with Bruce on this, but I need to point out that even if the 3 tenths of a percent were somehow in question, it doesn’t amount to anything worth getting excited about. It will change the dollars in your pocket both as a wage earner and as a Social Security beneficiary by nothing you would be able to notice. Even with Peterson shouting about it, you would be hard put to come up with an honset way of calculating it. 3 tenths of a percent amounts to $2.50 per week, which you will get back, and which comes out in the wash in other ways.
It could, if somehow it disappeared (it won’t) change the date of the Death of the Trust Fund… by a year or so. Again, nothing you would notice, because by then, if we are sane, we will have raised the payroll tax enough to pay as we go for the then-current benefits, and will not even notice the transition from partly paid by the trust fund to fully paid by current taxes.
Right, Coberly. Remember “pay as you go”, y’all? It works you know. And, does away once and for all with arguments about solvency. NOrtiz
“BK either knows and intentionally misrepresented this or doesn’t know and doesn’t care.”
I’ve read a lot of Krasting’s stuff. I don’t think he’s lying, and I don’t think he doesn’t care. He’s just “captured” himself. He made a decision long ago about what was “right” and what was “wrong” and he (like many others, natch) just filters all new information through this prism. New information is not going to change his mind, and while you are well within your rights to take apart all his inaccuracies and poor logic, you can’t hope to have a meaningful bilateral debate. Also, although he does like to attempt to provide lots of support for his ideas, his patina of logic is micro-thin and easily pierced. It comes from no deep understanding of anything at work in life or in SS, but simply from a mind scrounging for any sort of argument in support of a predetermined position.
As I’ve said before, I don’t particularly agree with some of your underlying premises about how we should view SS as a program and as an element of society, but I appreciate your thoughts and attempts to set forth the facts in as straightforward a fashion as possible.
Well I very respected blogger and a good friend of Angry Bear had Krasting’s story forwarded and suggested to Dan that AB respond. So on behalf of the blog I did.
I don’t really concern myself about Krasting, I don’t visit his site or follow his work at SeekingAlpha, but I guess some people do. And a Google search on ‘Krasting Social Security’ turned up a lot more of his work than I would have thought. But interspersed are enough pieces by me and Dale to hopefully at least raise some red flags.
I got a lot of time on my hands these days, I don’t mind ‘spiking Krasting’s wheels’ to my list of a pastimes.
Jones
thanks. your description of Krastings “error” pretty well describes the nature of all blogthought.
Krasting’s posts on SS return on high google so that’s how I found his stuff originally. He was first AFAIK to analyze the actual cash-negative condition of the fund this year, and that was useful.
But the man is seriously screwed in the head about SS. One of his posts last month went on how we need to dial back the SSTF’s return to make it look more like a 2-3yr treasury bond fund rather than the ~5% its collecting now. This made no sense to me, if we can give nearly everyone a ~35% mortgage interest credit we can afford to juice their retirement insurance return program by a point or so (and I’m not even sure we’re doing that).
SSI does have international pension agreements with many foreign countries, not sure how this interacts with illegal immigrants however.
Troy–I was going to mention SS’s totalization agreements with other countries, but was afraid it was TMI. This sort of detail usually makes peoples’ eyes glaze over. Now that you raise the subject, we have totalization with Canada, the UK, and a number of other European countries.
The Bush administration attempted to negotiate a totalization deal with Mexico shortly after he took office, but the deal fell through when illegal immigration hit record highs early. Deal is the worker gets credit in our system for his work in the partner country. So do American workers who work in these countries. The work gets combined for insured status and benefit computation purposes. Good deal if the other country has a good social insurance system. Mexico doesn’t and a totalization agreement with them would
essentially mean we picked up the cost of their whole system.
As far as the SSA is concerned, the people who worked here without docs and return to their own country get paid totalized benefits or SS benefits under our system alone. Only if they remain here are their benefits suspended until such time as they become legal or return home. As I said before, I estimate that more than half of all illegal aliens receive SS benefits eventually. Doesn’t constitute a very large “fraud” under any circumstances. Nancy Ortiz
Bruce, I love ya and admire ya, and wish you the best of luck, but this isn’t gonna work. The fix is in.
I want to set a date early next year when I hope your frustration, disappointment, and rage will leave you open to a re-assessment of your political methodology.
^ I’m with Bob
As I mentioned below, the SSTF, taken as a SWF, is larger than the next 5 or 6 SWFs.
Such a juicy thing to steal, and nobody’s around to defend it, like taking candy from a baby.
The first MSM person to post on negative cash flow was Lori Montgomery of the WaPo back in March 2009. Lori was getting her numbers from Kevin Hassett of AEI with the feedback function supplied by blogger Andy Biggs of Notes on Social Security Reform (an absolutely indispensable blog on SS for the Right outlook) where former Deputy Commissioner Andrew Biggs is also a top analyst at AEI. Whether Krasting picked up the trail from Montgomery or direct from AEI or like a blind pig found it on his own is immaterial, Angry Bear and Biggs/Notes were in open battle on this many months before Krasting smelt his first acorn.
Troy while the Trust Fund is real as real there really is nothing to steal looking backwards. It is a perfectly valid claim on capital by labor but can’t be stolen as such. Worst case scenario is that capital can abrogate the debt, it can’t seize the asset because it is carried on their books as a liability. Now they can try to grab on the tax revenues going forwards via fees on personal accounts but in this case the past is the past. While they didn’t steal those dollars (yet) they did spend them already, there are not two trips to that well.
The way I see it, since the Boomer’s retirement isn’t going to be compromised, the theft of the SSTF will entail another ratcheting up of the Greenspan Commission solution of raising payroll taxes, when of course it is actually time to have capital start paying back labor the $1.5T + accrued interest they’ve borrowed from us.
We’ve really got to keep an eye on the where that $2.5T+ pea goes, the shells are going to start moving soon.
Coberly and I have a compromise plan that smoothes out the need to honor existing debt (nothing is abrogated) while imposing mild increases in payroll tax while putting the entire system into infinite future actuarial balance. But since no one can grasp that there is a win win solution we are dismissed as lunatics. Oh well.
i dont think so
He made a decision long ago about what was “right” and what was “wrong” and he (like many others, natch) just filters all new information through this prism. New information is not going to change his mind,
No, this does not describe the nature of all blog thought. It describes what passes for a thought process among conservatives of a certain type.
Cheers!
JzB
chand
very difficult to determine what your comment means.
the “mild increase in payroll tax” that Bruce mentions is about twenty cents per week each year. More or less depending on what happens, but very unlikely to be much more. I can’t prove the very unlikely… there is no way to assign probabilities to this kind of thing, but the twenty cents per week is mathematically certain if the Trustees Report is reasonably correct. It is mathematically the same thing as the 5 Trillion Dollar Deficit over the 75 year window, or the 15 Trillion dollar deficit over the infinite horizon.
These are just hysterical ways of saying “twenty cents per week per year per customer.” The twenty cents is in today’s terms: today’s dollar, today’s wages… the actual number will change over time, but the “felt value” will not. If anything the felt value will go down as incomes rise to 200% of today’s… as projected in the same Trustees Report. And you have to remember that twenty cents per week is going to pay for the longer life expectancy of the guy paying the tax. So he will get it back, with interest.
The bigger scarier numbers you may have heard are complete fantasies. dishonest through and through, but the Petersons can be pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to tell.
Beyond the SSA ESF
The Social Security Administration has been under a legal obligation since the end of fiscal year 1996 to provide the U.S. Congress “the aggregate quantity of social security account numbers issued to aliens not authorized to be employed, with respect to which, in such fiscal year, earnings were reported to the Social Security Administration.” This requirement is mandated under Section 414 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, P.L. 104-208. This information is maintained in the SSA Non Work Alien File.
As an example, 522,403 such SSNs recorded W-2 earnings in 2006. The Non Work Alien File records are not included in the Earnings Suspense File (ESF) as the SSNs and employee names match.
As Webb says neither he nor I know the exact amount that SS has collected from ilegal workers. I doubt that even the SSTF has a “hard” number on this. Goss put the range at 120-240b as of 2007. We know it it is larger today than it was back then. I tried to make the case based on the Pew info that the number is on the high side of the range versus the low side. When has it every been “smart’ to estimate low for SS?? Answer: Never?
Web etal seem to think it makes no difference that ~300b was collected with full knowledge that no benefits would be paid. Hello. Let me repeat the number for you $300,000,000. 1/3 of a trillion. That is not a rounding error.
We shall see where this takes us. I think it is a big development. I have been contacted by the MSM on this and believe there will be additional stories this week on this. Others do not see this as trivial. (I sent one of the broadcasters a link to the Webb piece.)
Webb looks at this narrowly. He looks at it as an actuarial issue. I think it is more than that. SS closed their eyes and collected hot money for years. If that had not been the case the explosion of illegal workers would not have happened as it did. SS contributed to the problem. We know that the true cost of illegal workers is much higher than any contributions they made to SS. But all those wokers came here understanding that they could buy a fake SS for $100. After that they could work everywhere.
The money SS has collected was central to the immigration problem. It enabled them. Someone approved this long ago. I want to see the memo from a prior administration that said, “Lets keep mum on this. It is a bailout for SS”.
BK– SS does not keep track of benefits paid by beneficiary immigration status. That is because as far as the program goes, it doesn’t matter. Earnings in, benefits out. My previous explanation of how this works should be sufficient. To emphasize, it is perfectly legal for a person to receive SS benefits on wages earned while in the country illegally as long as the person receives those benefits outside the US. It has always been legal as far as I know. I was hired as a bilinual speaker of Spanish to process these claims and did so personally or in a supervisory capacity for 32 years. TBC
BK:
“Webb looks at this narrowly. He looks at it as an actuarial issue. I think it is more than that. SS closed their eyes and collected hot money for years. If that had not been the case the explosion of illegal workers would not have happened as it did.”
Yes illegal aliens have paid into SS greatly by buying SS Cards from illicit sources in order to get work from companies illegally and who many times did not even require a SS card to work as long as it was cash and under minimum wage. State, federal,and local law is pretty clear on the issues of crossing the boarder, taxes, and minimum wage. If you are going to indict SS, then I would think you would indict every form of government which looked the other way while fully aware companies hired illegals.
If you are looking for association over the last decade, I would certainly look to the Bush administration as there appears to be an explosion of immigration then. It is no secret that each administration appoints officials to SS.
You are investing in scatology looking for a fresh smell when none really exists.
BK, contnd–The Simpson Mazzoli or Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it illegal to work in the US without authorization to work and it also made it illegal “knowingly” to hire an illegal alien. As a result, employers became alarmed that they could be accused of discriminating against a person with no documents or be prosecuted if they accepted offered documents that turned out to be counterfeit. A comprimise provision gave them a good faith defense whereby few if any prosecutions for hiring illegals have subsequently taken place.
Of course, the Suspense file contains unposted earnings put there because people make payroll errors, get married and don’t report a name change, change the form of their name–all kinds of ordinary reasons. But, the use of counterfeit docs and made up SSN’s are a big percentage of the problem. As soon as Simpson Mazzoli passed, every unemployed crook in the country got into the counterfeit document business and has produced millions of bad drivers’ licenses, insurance certificates, birth certificates from the US or any other country, and any kind of ID document you can mention. Just as a sidelight, identity theft has become a big business as well what with all the bad docs around, you might as well join the fun.
Making it illegal to work here without docs created this mess. It could be fixed in a flash by changing the law back the way it was. Not a big deal, really. Unless you want it to be. Nancy Ortiz
MG:
The illegal issuance of SS cards is symtomatic to the issue of illegal immigration. You can not work without one now unless you do so for cash. I don’t believe you can hold SS responsible as much as the businesses hiring illegal aliens. Typically the companies doing so, do so with the knowledge of from where these workers are coming. In any case a younger and working labor force does provide a steady stream of revenue to the Federal, State, SS, etc. It is not just SS who benefits from this. The loudest advocacy of do nothing I suspect is the Chamber of Commerce.
By 2050, Hispanics will be the second largest group in the US, having surpassed blacks, and closing in on whites (“300 Million and Counting,” Joel Garreau). The disadvantage to a growing population of Hispanics is not the ethnicity as some of the articles are concerned with and exibit a degree of xenophobia; but, it still is and will be job creation. Job creation will be an issue even if we close the borders and become fortress America. Up till 2001, the US economy was absobing a growing population into the Civilian Labor Force. Today, the numbers of the NonInstitutional Civilian Population joining the work force is on a downward trend even with similar growth patterns of it. This is the first time in the history of collecting these numerics, we have experienced a long term downward trend. Without Job Creation, this country is in far more danger than it may be in from a growing Hispanic and/or illegal imigration which for all intents and purposes has given us a younger work force than what Europe has.
Nancy, I am surprised to see this. Let me gt this straight. A person comes across the border illegally. They buy a phony SS#. They use the card and get a job. This person has SS deductions taken from his pay. This person is here for (say) 17 years and worked the whole time. Now he goes back home to Mexico. From there he writes SS that he paid all this money and used a phony card. SS writes back that they have a record of all those payments from the employer. They starting writing this fellow monthly checks based on his contributions. They mail the checks to his home in Mexico.
And you say this is a common prctice and his happening all the time and that SS has hired translators to facilitate this??
If this is more or less what you are implying I would lkie to hear from you. I think your first hand knowledge of this could be important. I know a few people in the media. I sent them your comments. Write me and I will introduce them to you. Who knows, you may get on TV. I did.
Bkrasting@gmail.com
Of course it is not unusual for the mainstream media to smell a story in any crackpot idea that can be played as scandal.
BK started out, to my knowledge, with something useful to say… namely the effect on the bond market of paying off the Trust Fund. of course his ideas about that were wrong headed and frankly criminal. But now he has descended to the merley crackpot. Which means he is likely to draw a big audience.
MG–SSA does not issue SSN’s to people who are in the US illegally. Such people are ineligible to receive a number. When they come to an SSA office and apply for a number without proper evidence or with counterfeit evidence (and about half of all applicants are not eligible for numbers) we record the application on the computer system with codes for ineligibility–counterfeit docs is the most common.) If the person is in the country LEGALLY but is not authorized to work here, SSA issues a non-work SSN. The law requires this and all such cards are marked NOT FOR WORK PURPOSES.
Nothing can prevent an employer from using a non-work number to submit a payroll tax return for the number holder. And, it’s going to show up on the system. Let me repeat,
once the work is done and the tax is paid the employee has covered earnings. This is a common problem that goes back a long way. For example in the 90’s, Congress passed a law requiring SSA to issue SSN’s to the children of workers from certain countries (Korea and Japan were two, IIRC) for use on income tax returns. I don’t know how many such cards were issued, but the number was huge. To be contnd.
More on Non-Work SSN’s–People in local offices complained, but top SSA management refused to acknowledge that this policy invited misuse of these SSN’s. So, now we get earnings showing up not just on non-work numbers for adults but also for small children. But, there is nothing to prevent anyone from using his child’s card to work, if he can get a nice set of counterfeit docs to go with it and the employer accepts the docs as valid. Or you can sell your card and get another one. Or you can just pass your number around to your friends. This is old, old news. SSA knows, BK. Nothing new. We have procedures to correct problems like this and many more.
You can get a duplicate SS card just by reporting it lost and producing govt ID with a photograph three times a year without having to pay for it. Used to be that you could get any number of dup cards with no fee. Now, there’s a limit. But, point is, any valid SSN card SSA issued is worth money. Any document that matches is gonna cost ya.
All this stuff creates work for the people who work at SSA. It’s a frequent occurence, we straighten it out if we can, post wages to the correct records or take them off if they’re posted on the wrong record ad infinitum. This is business as usual and has always been so.
Now, did someone in the government sit down and scheme to produce this result? BWAAAHHHHAAHAAHAA. I haf plan so eveel zat it weel bring down whole US guvmint! Natasha, get ze car! Ve arr goink to Sozial Sekurite offiz to get number and go to vurk! And call frendz too! We goink to vurk until ve bankrupt zyztem!
No, BK. Didn’t happen. Give it up. Nancy Ortiz
No BK. I am not saying they hired me to facilitate a shady, illicit deal for an illegal alien. They hired me to take claims from people who were insured for benefits, illegal or not. Then, of course, people can go home and get checks. This is LEGAL. Believe it or not, perfectly legal. If Congress had intended to, it could have passed a law making all those quarters of coverage disappear. But, they didn’t and they haven’t and I’d be surprised if they ever do. Because the work gone done and the taxes got paid and that’s that whether you like it or not. Sir, give this up. It is dishonest, misleading and wrong to do what you are doing. I am finished writing to you on this subject. Nancy Ortiz
Right, Coberly. Watch out, Faux News, here he comes! NancyO
Webb, I did post this at 1:34. And I di write to you three hours and ten minutes later. Not sure where the nine minutes comes in. Help my on that. What is is you are suggesting?
I wrote to you becasue I thought this was a big deal. I had already poste the article. I wanted to get your take. I know you always look at SS in the soiftest light possible. You did not dissapoint
Why not give a link to your post? So I could see your question in context?
“I just posted this. What do you think?” Not sand bagging.
Posting and not alerting me that this wasn’t actual a request of opinion but a way of getting me on record sight unseen of the post? Sandbagging.
Note that I gave fair warning prior to this post and the link after it went up. That is how serious players who want honest airing of differences work it.
BK should take a field trip to a field office and the OIO so he visit all of those shady claims reps and benefits authorizers taking claims and paying benefits to former unauthorized workers. SS is not just a Ponzi scheme, it’s a criminal conspiracy!
But I’m not sure what’s so shocking about the idea that SS taxes the proceeds of illegal activities. Or that SS contemplates possibly spending that money. After all, is the money spent from the general fund that comes from taxation of illegal enterprises somehow not real? If not, then how is this taxation of the earning of unauthorized immigrants not real?
The whole post is absurd. Extra bonus points for imputing motives on SS as an organization, as if somehow a mostly automated bureaucracy somehow became self-aware… just absurd. Keeping earnings straight is a statutory requirement for SS which is how the ESF arose. Enforcement of immigration laws is the Dept. of Homeland Security’s bailiwick. The same way the IRS doesn’t go running to law enforcement agencies when people claim proceeds from illegal activities.
There are people whose life revolves around proving their false theories correct despite having to revolve around untenable “noble lies”.
Krasting and most of the opposition to SS are working to excuse for the few pillaging the many.
Krasting should take the red pill and pursue truth rather than defending the lies.