Social Security has been one of the most embattled programs in American history. Set up by President Roosevelt over 80 years ago, the program designed to help Americans when they reach retirement has been abused and misused for generations.
Americans who paid into the system all their lives often have trouble receiving benefits when they retire. Meanwhile immigrants and others who have not contributed are able to withdraw from SS on day one of entering the country.
Presidents have worked to reform the system, to alleviate the burden it will place on future generations, but have often been denied by liberal lawmakers.
Today the Social Security program is in great need of help and reform. President Trump has vowed to preserve the benefits of both Social Security and Medicaid, but change is still needed.
Recent news is flooring Americans and revealing a scandal you wish could only be made up. Instead it has only confirmed the great problems SS faces and the challenge Trump faces.
From Right Wing News:
An audit found that the Social Security Administration paid out over $1 billion in benefits to people that don’t have social security numbers — or, people that should not be able to get benefits at all. The government’s documentation of “representative payees,” or people who receive benefits on behalf of someone else incapable of managing their affairs, was evidently massively flawed.
Over the last 10 years, the SSA has paid out $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who did not have a social security number and who the SSA did not follow its policy to get a paper application from. “[U]nless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182.5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection,” the inspector general said.
As if that wasn’t enough, the inspector general found that the SSA paid $853.1 million since 2004 to representative payees that had been terminated by the agency. The agency did not update the system once someone had been terminated and did not keep up with paper applications.
This is the kind of abuse that has been going on in the federal government for years, particularly over the last eight years. Big spender Barack Obama seemed to be unwilling to make necessary cuts in our budget or to even evaluate where our money is going.
This shocking amount of cash going to unwarranted beneficiaries proves that under Obama, there was virtually no oversight to ensure that taxpayer dollars went to the right places. Even the smallest amount of accountability could have caught these kinds of glaring errors.
It’s sad to think of all the hard-working Americans, who toiled for years to support their families and country, paying into the Social Security program, who are now denied basic benefits because of these abuses. Meanwhile strangers and non-citizens are receiving a billion dollars worth of support.
It’s time for this kind of nonsense to end.
(via: Patriot Journal)
