This analogy fails on several levels.
▪️The GOP already passed a budget that would limit federal spending by 1%/yr and raise the debt ceiling by $1.5T. So they’re agreeing to pay for and continue a slightly more fancy lobster dinner. But the Democrats aren’t satisfied with this dinner, they want a much more lavish one.
▪️The people running up the bill aren’t paying for it anyway. They take other people’s money to pay the bill. There’s no honor or responsibility in “paying the bill” in this analogy, it just means the lobster dinner will continue even more extravagantly with more of other people’s money.
▪️But the meme is right about one thing. If you or I tried to have a fancy dinner and force others to pay for it there would be criminal charges.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
