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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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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.