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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Clearly Biden is doing a bunch of fuckery intended to tie up Trump during his first few months in office. Biden's reputation is already garbage, there's no loss.

But I think it's unlikely to work. Trump's team is highly motivated right now. The bandwidth of Biden's demoralized staffers is just not that high compared to what Trump will be able to muster.

I think it's likely* (not guaranteed) that the Doge comes in with hundreds or thousands of high IQ workaholics that will have the bandwidth to undo all Biden's bullshit before making sweeping changes of their own. If Elon's standards at SpaceX are any indication, we're about to see an explosion of competence in the executive branch that hasn't existed in decades, maybe ever.

I know the cool take right now is that the Doge will fizzle. The "nothing ever happens" crowd is usually right. But I'll take the over. Something will happen this time. I think they will do a Milei on the U.S. government and the results will be amazing.

I think it's likely* (not guaranteed) that the Doge comes in with hundreds or thousands of high IQ workaholics that will have the bandwidth to undo all Biden's bullshit before making sweeping changes of their own.

I disagree strongly. DOGE is almost certainly going to be less effective than the Church Commission:

In 1981, America was still a serious country. Compared to now, anyway. It is a fallacy to assume that we can pump more joules into the same target. We have less to pump. When we print out the final report of DOGE and put it on a shelf next to the 47-volume work product of Reagan’s Grace Commission, which will look more serious?

47 volumes! Think about all the people who put all that work into all those reports. Some of them must still be alive today. They must know that if none of this work had ever been done, the world 40 years later would not be even slightly different. Sad!

I hope that I'm wrong, but my hunch about DOGE is that they will cut a million here, a million there, but will not be able to get rid of any major inefficiencies, and that they will avoid touching the $1 trillion / year military-intelligence budget, since that is a sacred cow for both Democrats and especially Republicans, and is also a massive and very sensitive jobs program.

What would go wrong if you just deleted the department of education?

In my opinion, less than what would go right if we deleted it. But it would probably be hard to find a national-level majority that agrees with me about that. The Department of Education is also a sacred cow because people understandably are very attached to children, and a huge fraction of people are still stuck in the mindset that mass education is actually effective at making people more educated beyond the reading/writing/arithmetic basics.

Community college would become much more expensive.

Good. I frankly don't trust or expect people like Elon to be able to meaningfully be able to separate wheat from chaff within the federal government.

The alternative is default or hyperflation.

We're already spending > $1 trillion per year on interest on the debt. The government spends more than 140% of what it brings in each year.

This is a fiscal doom loop unless something stops it.

Surely too much debt is a problem, but cashflow issues be solved by either reducing spending or increasing revenue. And when you're talking about a government's budget, increasing revenue can be some combination of increasing tax rates and increasing tax base/GDP. Obviously, much of political disagreement is over exactly which policies will maximize GDP, and Republicans routinely state they believe things like DOGE will increase economic productivity by getting the federal government out of the way. On the other hand, the Democrats believe better regulations, which require funding the federal government, will maximum GDP. And they're in favor of raising taxes.

Additionally, it's unclear the current situation is "too much" debt. The Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product and Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments charts don't look great. On the other hand Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product looks high, but nowhere near a historical high.

Maybe I have a higher threshold for what "hyperinflation" is, but I think you can print your way out the debt without getting all the way there.

I do wonder about the second order effects: The USD is the reserve currency, central goverments have large stockpiles of it, and, all over the world, entire asset classes (like real estate) are denominated in it.

It's a scary time to be long bonds. Of course, it's a scary time to be long stocks as well.

Gold is the default alternative right now; it’s not hard to imagine a role for bitcoin as well.

Either way, we’ve seen inflation in reserve currencies before. It’s survivable.

There is no difference between default and hyperinflation, at least not as it affects the average citizen.

elon recently tweeted that he thinks social security fraud is likely in the range of 10-20%. that would be a decent pot of money if true. (sounds insane to be fair)

Elon doesn't know what he's talking about. I used to work as an adjudicator for the PA Disability Determination Bureau, and the investigation is so thorough that getting disability through fraudulent means is effectively impossible. The evaluation is mostly based on the claimant's actual medical records and, if those are insufficient, the bureau will schedule an examination. Some information comes from the claimant themself, but most of this is clarification about medical treatment or conditions which are noted on the medical records but that they aren't claiming disability for. The ydo fill out an ADL form, but this is only really taken into consideration in the event that the claim is borderline; in that case it might tip the balance toward an approval but only if the condition is significantly limiting their ADLs in a way that one would expect the condition to limit them. In any event, most ADLs show some limitations but not nearly the kind that would be sufficient to tip the balance in that circumstance. For example, if a guy is claiming disability for a back problem there's probably going to be something about how they don't move around very well and can't lift heavy objects. They probably aren't going to claim that the pain is so bad that they can't get out of bed and have to have someone else do housework for them.

Realistically, the only way you're getting disability on the initial application is if you're over the age of 50, have a job that involves physical labor, and haven't done any other kind of work in the past 20 years. If you're under 50 it's assumed you can adjust to other work, so if you're capable of doing a sedentary job that doesn't require any special qualifications you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have an office job you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have a job that involves physical labor but there's a similar job that uses the same skills but doesn't involve physical labor you're denied. If you're over 50 and you generally work a job that involves physical labor but you you worked the register at your brother's convenience store a decade ago when he was just starting out and needed extra help, you're denied.

Some of the cases I can remember: One approval of the more typical kind involved a 55-year-old black guy who worked as a welder his entire career and had back problems. Claims of back problems are common, but this guy had serious problems documented on x-ray and had undergone at least one surgery. He tried to go back to work after the surgery but had to stop. Another case involved a guy in his 30s with brain cancer who was in such bad shape I couldn't talk to him directly and had to get the information from his sister (cases like this are flagged upon intake so they can be approved quickly). One case involved a 16-year-old girl who had severe psychological and emotional problems to the point that her mother couldn't take care of her and she was put into a group home, but her behavior was so bad that she kept getting kicked out of them. She had been admitted to Western Psych repeatedly over the past few years. I only spoke to her briefly; most of my communication was with her mother, who spent most of the conversation on the brink of tears as she talked about how she didn't know what she was going to do about her daughter and how scared she was about the future. I honestly don't know if this is an approval because I left before the case was resolved. I was pushing hard to get it out the door because it was clear to me that this girl would never be capable of working but my supervisor was skeptical because, if memory serves, while she had frequent hospitalizations it had been close to a year since the last one so maybe things were improving.

Now, I saw plenty of bullshit as well, but it was obvious bullshit that resulted in a denial. The modal case for this was some kid in his early 20s who never worked for any length of time and never had any education beyond high school who was trying to claim disability for psych problems despite having never seen a psychiatrist. He might be taking some kind of antidepressant but it was always prescribed by a PCP and didn't follow any kind of psych workup. That presents a complication, since we can't deny the claim without any psychiatric evidence, so we'd have him evaluated by a psychiatrist who would invariably conclude that the kid had garden-variety anxiety and depression but nothing that would prevent him from working. Psych claims usually require a longitudinal history of progressively worsening problems, or else some kind of huge psychic break that's unavoidable. But most of the cases are people who obviously have problems, just not of sufficient severity to render them disabled. The determination office is basically a denial machine, and most of the claims that are approved at the initial stage are ones so obvious that no one could possibly claim they were fraudulent. There are also a small number of people who have already retired and later have a health problem and figure they'll file just to see if they qualify.

Now, once you get beyond the initial determination stage and into appeals, the success rate is much higher. However, if you're appealing then you have an attorney and the case is heard by an administrative judge who issues an opinion. I think that the reason for this is that few of the bullshit claims get appealed, so the cases the judge sees are of overall higher quality that what are seen at the initial stage, especially since most of the severe cases are sent to a different department for fast-tracking. An adjudicator who spends all day dealing with marginal claims basically turns into a denial machine. I saw a statistic that claims 38% of initial applications that reached the adjudication stage (i.e., not denied for technical reasons, which half of all initial claims are) were approved. This seems way too high. Granted, the numbers are from ten years after I stopped working there and I can't speak to how they do things in other states, but in my office it was like 20%, 25% tops. And that includes expedited cases and cases adjudicated by people who have been there for 20 years and think they can tell an approval from a denial based on gut feeling.

I wasn't there long, but in my time there I evaluated hundreds of claims, and I never once saw anything I thought looked fraudulent. As I said, there were bullshit claims, but these were obviously bullshit, and in any event the claimants weren't lying about anything. It's one of those things that just isn't worth it. The average SSDI benefit is $1,200/month, and the average SSI benefit is $800/month. And if you make more than something like $1,200/month from a regular job your benefits get cut off. So the reward one gets from perpetrating a fraud on the system is a life of bare subsistence living. One thing I can't speak to is fraud at the technical level, for example, people hiding income or assets so they qualify for SSI. Given the high rate of technical rejections, it's clear both that SSA is doing thorough investigations and that people aren't even trying to hide much. I'm not saying that fraud doesn't exist, but the guardrails in place for preventing it are so high and the incentive for committing it are so low that I doubt there's much savings to be had here.

pinging @jeroboam, since I didn't see his comment until after posting this

thanks for taking the time to write this out

I guess I just wonder how much this sort of thing happens.

Most SS fraud is going to be concentrated in SSDI, which is like 15% of its budget. And although I bet there is a shocking amount of fraud in it, it's not going to be 100% fraudulent.

How common is "Grandma died, don't tell anyone and keep cashing her checks"?

The US doesn’t have any big regions with anomalously long life expectancy, so if it is common it’s concentrated by a protected status, not geography- which makes it verboten to crack down on.

Disability prevalence is geographically concentrated, but largely in dying to dead rural areas where the working-age adult population skews old and uneducated and non-physically demanding jobs are scarce, but rents are cheap enough that it's viable to eke out a living on federal benefits, places like Hale County, Alabama, also profiled here by NPR.

It varies by region, per Ig Nobel laureate S. J. Newman.

I know the cool take right now is that the Doge will fizzle. The "nothing ever happens" crowd is usually right. But I'll take the over. Something will happen this time. I think they will do a Milei on the U.S. government and the results will be amazing.

I respect the energy. Which big changes do you think will happen?

And which ones are you looking forward to?

It's more "I can't predict what a good chess player will do, but I bet he'll do something good". There are very motivated and smart people involved. And, of course, never bet against Elon.

To give a taste of something I think is possible, Elon tweeted recently about fraud in the social security department. How much fraud happens? How much do we pay to dead people? Who is keeping track? The government recently acknowledged that it basically did no checks on PPP loans during the pandemic and "forgave" tens of billions (probably more) of dubious loans, some from obviously fraudulent LLCs such as "2019 Dodge Ram Crewcab".

Even if old age pensions are relatively free of fraud, SSA disability is a swamp. The number of "disabled" workers has just gone up and up and now represents 5% of the labor force (as of 2019, likely much more now). It goes on and on. Medicare fraud is omnipresent. As is fraud in defense procurement.

One criticism of the DOGE is that the biggest areas of the government are immune from being cut. I think that's false. There is waste and fraud everywhere.

If you run with the lower classes good odds you know of someone who is collecting disability but could easily work some non-back-breaking job. I know a few. One guy I know collects veterans disability but could easily do even heavy labor. His claimed disability is PTSD from an event that happened off-base in an allied country and outside the line of duty. The guy just parties all the time.

There are 8.9 million SSDI recipients in the US. The average monthly payment is $1,483.

Say you paid investigators to go out and spy on one person each working day. There are 240 working days in a year.

If you paid the investigator $70,000, they'd need to catch four people to break even on their salary.

If more than 1.7% of people are committing such obvious fraud that you'll catch them with one day of observation, then it's worth it to hire the investigator.

Well, there's also the process for getting them kicked off of disability, there's the necessary evidentiary standards for each claim(which vary from claim to claim), etc. All this changes the calculus.

Remind me, how much additional revenue have those 87,000 IRS agents brought in?

I hope you realise that catching this fraud entails a massive expansion of the state. America likely has plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick here given how undersized the relevant governmental bodies are but it's hardly free and the benefits won't necessarily be quick, while the PR downsides will be.

Catching and preventing this fraud will be a hard long-term project with both up- and downsides.

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