I was going to comment on this Paul Krugman column and Dean Baker’s response eventually anyway. Both analyze Elon Musk’s false claims about Social Security and debunk his insistence that there could be that much fraud. Baker describes that requiring SSA recipients to use online portals rather than the phone would “reduce fraud by an amount equal to 0.007 percent of spending.” But both also assume that the reason Elon clings stubbornly to those claims after being disproven is about protecting his own ego.
My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.
[snip]
Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?
In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from...
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