Antonio Gracias Talks Social Security With Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends!

Finally the [FOX] article gets back to familiar ground for this blog:

Meanwhile, DOGE said last week it had removed approximately 7 million Social Security accounts belonging to people listed as being over 120 years old.

We, in fact, have a whole post covering just this announcement. Being intimately familiar with what DOGE claimed, we were surprised to see Hill characterize it as “removing approximately 7 million Social Security accounts,” because we know what DOGE actually claimed was that “approximately 3.2 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased.” Having your record marked as deceased would appear to be, in important ways, different from having your account removed. It’s not even clear what “removing” a Social Security “account” would mean. Would that mean deleting the record? That would be a terrible idea! Does it mean deactivating payments for it? That seems doubtful, since you’d just say that instead. And it would be meaningless from a fraud standpoint, as SS already automatically prevents payments from being sent to any person over the age of 115, un-alive or not. In fact, since, whatever this sentence means, it’s clear it could not possibly impact SS fraud, why is it even in this article at all? Who knows! But you have to admit, it sure sounds like it’s important and relevant, until you think about it for a moment.

Let’s sum up some of this article’s misleading implications:

• It implies that only during Joe Biden’s administration did “millions of non-citizens receive SSNs,” when in fact, millions also did under Donald Trump’s administration.
• It implies that all 5.5 million people represented here entered the country without proper authorization, when in fact the vast majority of them did have proper authorization at entry.
• It says that all 5.5 million of these people came to the US “to get benefits,” a claim which no one could possibly substantiate and is, to put it politely, hard to believe.
• It implies that “thousands” of these people fraudulently voted in federal elections, with the only evidence presented being that some of these people did actually vote, which is entirely expected since some of these people were naturalized as citizens.
• It claims these 5.5 million SSNs are “fraudulent” without explaining what that could possibly mean or providing any support for it.