Nice article. It would be nice if the fraudsters were slapped in jail when discovered, but I don't see much of that happening. Billions stolen, but not many perps walking as far as I can tell. Are the fake daycare centers still receiving checks or is the money still flowing while "investigations" go on and lawyers suck up even more funds arguing the case? I don't know at this point. If there were swift and very real and stringent consequences for fraud there would be less of it. Weak "guardrails" are one thing, but doing nothing when the rails are breached is even worse.

I do cringe when Social Security (or SS Ponzi as I like to say) is referred to as an entitlement program since I and my employers on my behalf were forced to pay into it for my entire working life. The bit I receive is actually a return on investment, not an entitlement, even if I was forced to invest. With that said, there are many that never paid in or have paid in extremely little, yet are collecting nearly as much as I am. That would be fraud (entitlement?), but nothing is done to correct it. In fact, the Biden administration's golden vote buying autopen made it worse as now many retired government employees receiving government retirement checks are now eligible to collect SS and have never paid in a dime. I know two of the "recipients" personally so I know it's for real. They got their first checks this past January.

LibertyPen Well done.

This is a very good article covering the ground well from slackness in admin to bad incentives.

There is mention of "the genuinely eligible beneficiaries".
Well I do agree that there are people in that category, many, what I am uneasy and not convinced about is whether alleviating that hardship/suffering should be done with money extracted from others by compulsion.

What the article tells us is that heartfelt concern leads to open-ended support and government intervention. There appears to be no theoretical limit to this kind of spending, correction is always very late and is in response to scandal rather than audited results and balance of voter intentions.