{"id":489647,"date":"2010-03-30T12:57:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T16:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/james-pethokoukis\/?p=3572"},"modified":"2010-03-30T12:57:28","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T16:57:28","slug":"waste-fraud-and-abuse-at-social-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/489647","title":{"rendered":"Waste, fraud and abuse at Social Security"},"content":{"rendered":"

The super-insightful Andrew Biggs looks how the Crist-Rubio debate dealt with Social Security — and finds laughable the former’s comments about restoring the system’s long-term solvency by rooting out waste, fraud and abuse:<\/p>\n

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As a general rule, when a politician mentions \u201cwaste, fraud, and abuse\u201d it should be interpreted the same as if the candidate wore a sign saying \u201cI\u2019m not serious.\u201d That\u2019s not to say that we don\u2019t have problems with fraud, but that the real problem is simply that the government spends too much.<\/p>\n

This is particularly so in the case of Social Security, which is one of the most efficient federal government programs. Social Security takes money from young workers, calculates a benefit for retirees based on their earnings and their years in the workforce, and cuts them a check. There\u2019s not a lot of discretion involved, which reduces chances for things to go wrong. Sure, there are problems in the disability program and I\u2019m confident there are folks getting disability benefits who actually could work. But that\u2019s the fault of the eligibility criteria passed by Congress in the 1980s more than any problem of vetting applicants by the Social Security Administration. On this issue, at least, Crist was very unimpressive.<\/p>\n

What did impress me, though, was the fact that Rubio\u2014who, after all, is running for the Senate from Florida\u2014was willing to be upfront about the hard choices awaiting us on Social Security. In part this may be due to the character of the candidate, who struck me as a principled conservative.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The super-insightful Andrew Biggs looks how the Crist-Rubio debate dealt with Social Security — and finds laughable the former’s comments about restoring the system’s long-term solvency by rooting out waste, fraud and abuse: As a general rule, when a politician mentions \u201cwaste, fraud, and abuse\u201d it should be interpreted the same as if the candidate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1063"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}