Peak Prosperity - How Many Are Collecting Social Security Who Shouldn’t Be?

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

This is truly unbelievable. As in jaw-droppingly astonishing to the point that the jaw is slacked open, and no words are forming to come out.Click Here for Part 2

The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Every day, it just gets more and more astonishing. Has Elon Musk and his Doge team just uncovered the biggest fraud ever in Social Security. Hello, everyone. Dr. Chris Martinson here, Peak Prosperity, and we're going to be talking about Elon Musk and his Doge team and what they just found in Social Security. And it is astonishing. This could be the most epic corruption we've ever seen. It's truly unbelievable, right? It's jaw-droppingly astonishing to the point where my jaw is slack and words don't actually come out appropriately. security database there are numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to false so they're not dead and he says maybe twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting

social security laugh laugh because these are the data buckets and you can clearly see here let me get my drawing tool out uh let to use a highlighter you can clearly see here the number of people whose death field is set to false who are over the age of 110 is 3.6 million from 110 120 and 3.4 million and 3.9 million people are supposed to be 130 to 39 and 140 year olds 150 year olds and all that and of course we just want to know who these people are, because we'd like to party with them, those 240 to 370-year-old people. It's just astonishing that we have a database like this.

And it's really, maybe it's as bad as it seems, maybe it's not as bad as it seems, but one thing is for sure, wow, this is really not a good look. And look, all it took was for one honest team to peek in and discover that the Social Security system, and I'm using that term very loosely here, has 394,943,364 people in it, whose date of death has been set to false out of a population of 334 million. Obviously not a good look. Now, this is quite a feat on a number of levels. First, there are allegedly nearly 16 million people alive in this database who are over 110 years or older. And like I said, two of them are 240 years or even older than that.

Second, there are many more people in the database than there are people in the U.S. census count by more than 60 million, almost 61 million. And that's quite the thing. Now, how can there be far more eligible Social Security numbers in the U.s than there are people is it speaks to the possibility that this is one of the greatest frauds ever seen now it's also possible this is just a bad database and they've just never taken the time to fix it

right so there might be somebody in there who's recorded in the system who died 80 years ago, and it's no big deal. Now, you know, this could be the biggest fraud ever, but, well, Doge hasn't quite gotten to the Department of Defense yet, so it could be in the running. All right. Now, after a little bit of digging into this, it turns out the Social Security system, the database, it's just a hot mess, gigantic hot mess, confirming for me the idea that the only

thing the government really does well is doing things poorly and i have no idea how much money or fraud is in here yet i i don't i don't know yet um so we're gonna have to dig into this just a little bit however when we turn here we see that a justin wolfer said it when this data first came out said you don't need to be a coder to figure this out simply type tab age you'll discover a smattering of 99 year olds a few hundred year olds a couple 101 year olds a pile up of 150 year olds but no one in their 130s or 40s a clear sign you've discovered a coding issue because toshi down here said looks like elon's genius coders don't know how cobalt the coding language works social security runs on cobal, which does not use a date or time type. So the date is stored as a number using some jargon there.

The epic for this is 150 years ago. So COBOL will default to 150 years if it doesn't have a date in there. That's what they say. Oh, no biggie. However, look at the table again. It's not like we have a bunch of people coming up to a certain age and then a big blank and then only people at 150. This turned out to be a really stupid explanation. In fact, turned out to be wrong. OK, now you would think, OK, well, you know, Justin Wolfers was wrong about this. So he's probably fixed that somehow and come back. But instead, what he did was he said, oh, well, actually, you know, this isn't a high tech data science. He says, looking at a histogram, first thing you do when looking at a new data set, we teach it in high school. And data Republican has just been knocking it out of the park, said, oh, sure,

because it makes perfect sense to allow missing birth dates in a system entirely based on birth dates. Clearly, it's just a harmless coding error, not, you know, a gaping loophole ripe for fraud. Justin Wolfers, we're going to note here, is a professor at University of Michigan, econ professor, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and intro econ textbook author. Think like an economist podcast. Yeah. I'm not so sure that I would want to be taught by this guy because he just goes on from that. And that didn't work out because it turned out the histogram didn't support his view on February 15th. So then he said on February 17th, well, he said, oh, well, you know, Elon pointed out there are far more eligible Social Security numbers than there are citizens in the U.S. might be the biggest fraud in history. And Justin there again to try and bat cleanup for team fraud

and corruption, trying to explain all this away, explains it by saying, quote, undocumented workers often use made up social security numbers. They're paying into the system, but without a legitimate social security number, they can't take anything out. So these folks are subsidizing social security for natives. Natives. Yeah, he's just saying, look, yeah, these illegal people, they're just trying to, you know, they're just trying to square things up, they're just trying to square things up. They're just trying to make things better again.

As Robert Murphy said, for those dizzy at home trying to follow all this kerfuffle here, turns out the whole COBOL means all of Elon's 150 year olds are really legit entries with their DOB argument went out the window. The new argument is that millions of fake social security numbers assigned to illegal immigrants is just further proof how dumb maga is end quote perfect robert you captured that just right uh and and that's that's really yeah i don't understand these people who instead of saying wow government we finally all can see that the government is really corrupt. And corrupt, you might think corrupt has one meaning, which is fraud.

It does. But it also could just mean corrupt as in rotting, as in the corruption of the body. It means that something has come off of its original form and is no longer up to task. It's rotted. It's corrupt. Okay. So I don't understand these people who are busy trying to explain away, minimize, or otherwise take the side that this corruption isn't that bad. This is bad. We have a database that's supposed to be administering the biggest social

entitlement program on the planet, and it doesn't do date fields correctly how is that not fixed by this point in time i don't know but as i said wait till wait till they get into the dod and dodge on february 14th said looking forward to working together with the dod we'll figure this out and how about this person? Jeff Hansen said a trillion dollar government program runs on archaic computer code that doesn't even require a valid date of birth on records completely reliant on a date of birth is not the flex you think it is, Justin Wolfers. So look, I have no idea how much money fraud there is in the system, how many checks are being sent either A, to people who are dead,

or were never alive in the first place, or B, to illegal aliens who submitted for Social Security payments. I don't know that. But we are going to get right back to that in just a second. Before I get into how all of this might not be as bad as it looks, just going to take a quick break. You know what? Gold and silver are

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Let's see how this might not be as bad as we thought. Now, here's an interesting but a very vague report out of the Office of the Inspector General. And this is an audit report. It was conducted in 20 of 2023, July of 2023. And it says number holders age 100 or older who did not have death information on the numidant. What the heck is a numidant? I didn't know. I had to look it up.

Numidant refers to the Social Security Administration's computer database file containing an abstract of information from a person's social security number application form SS-5, including their name, date of birth, other details, essentially acting as a record of all social security numbers issued since 1936. So numidant is short for Numerical Identification System. Okay, that makes sense. So, when we say here, hmm, what do we do with people aged 100 or older who do not have information on the NUMAdent? They're not in the system, okay? Now, according to this dense report right here, it turns out they say, well, you know, out of 18.4 million number holders, 98% of them are not currently receiving Social Security payments. Oh, that's good. Who for 98% of those people over the age 100 are not receiving Social Security payments. Now, what's crazy about this report is that they left a lot out of here.

They didn't tell us how much we're being paid. So we have to run the calculation ourselves. OK, 2 percent of 18.4 million turns out to be about 400,000 people being sent checks who are over 100 years of age against a census department estimate of about just under 90,000 living people over the age of 100. So that's not quite as cheery as the 98% figure makes it sound, right? That's about $5 billion of inappropriate payments each year to people who either are dead or never existed in the first place. Again, I have no idea the scale of the problem when extended to live people as well,

who also shouldn't be getting paid either. But it turns out that Justin Wolfers, again, that econ professor, you miss, he's a heavy Democrat partisan, we should point out here. He he wants you to know, of course, that it turns out that, you know, even if all those excess payments were being paid to illegal aliens, OK, it's OK because they were paying in. But here he is in August of 24 saying Trump's going to make a policy on the fly and he doesn't have a remotely competent econ team. No serious Republican economist will work with him.

And as well, in August of 29th of 24, he said, this is what happens when you submit the policy proposals of both candidates to similar scrutiny and trying to make a dunk here that you know harris is going to be much better for budget deficits than trump um pro tip don't don't pay to send your kids to university michigan just don't you're going to have to spend more money trying to get them um deprogrammed from this kind of garbage right here so uh obviously you know we have uh people here trying to dunk on trump and all this but look how do you do this this is very simple justin wolfers and everybody who thinks like you right now you're on the wrong side of this full stop this is corruption and corruption meaning both it could be fraud but also just it's a rotted

corpse of a system that's decaying rapidly it's just not how do we not say wow thank you for unearthing this and bringing this to our attention we should fix this right um all right now all justin wolf has convinced me of so far is that again nobody should send their kids to you mish right um because you're just going to have to pay extra to unprogram them from a bunch of indoctrination garbage and ideology junk taught there so don't do that here's what we know here's we know to recap the social security system at this particular stage one it allows records to exist without a birth date on a system entirely dependent on birth dates two it allows records to exist that have no death date on them, right? Even though the

person's clearly dead. Crazy, right? Okay. Three, it allows massive numbers of social security numbers to exist within the system that actually exceed the total number of living Americans by about 61 million. What kind of a, again, what kind of system is that? And it doesn't tie to any other systems for checks and balances. It doesn go over to census it doesn't tie into other places deaths it's just this own little floating morass right there okay washington dc has known about these massive issues for decades and decades right and has done nothing just done absolutely nothing and the reason of course is easy enough to determine. They like it that way. When D.C. doesn't like something, they aggressively fix it. Remember that we proposed the six hundred dollar rule on Venmo.

It's a threshold. And if you get more than six hundred dollars from Venmo, you're going to have to have a 1099 K form. And yeah, the IRS delayed that threshold to 2025 which is now um yeah yeah if they want to find out your 600 of course dc passes a law instantly but when it comes to fixing billions and billions and billions of dollars going out through gaping holes in a social security system nothing now look doge is uncovering more and more epic fraud and waste every day more corruption the possibility that important parts of our economy were entirely supported by waste and fraud is now an inescapable reality of course that's true but what happens when those money pipelines get shut off right well you need to be ready for almost anything at this point.

Things are going to get hairy. I can't see any other outcome at this point. Things are simply too corrupt to repair, so they have to first be dismantled. And that's why in part two for my subscribers, we are going to be cutting over to this. Can this level of corruption be reversed? If not, what are the consequences going to be? We're going to talk about gold exploding, uh, treasury market, not the right way. I mean, the government bond market, not the right way in Japan. And as well, the crazy response in Europe about what's going on.

This is part of my scouting service and I'm doing this for my subscribers. We'll go deeper, but I'm a little worried that we're not going to be able to dodge the bullet on this one. All right. With that, thanks very much for listening. We'll be back with you as soon as we can. And wow, things are going fast. Surf the avalanche, my good friends, and please be safe, be resilient. Until next time, I'm Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity. Bye for now.