August 07, 2010
The Washington Post adopted a new tactic in its ongoing campaign to cut Social Security benefits, highlighting a relatively trivial amount of mispayments or fraud, leading readers to believe that the program has major administrative problems. The Post devoted a major news story to a GAO report that found “1,500 federal workers might have received improper or fraudulent Social Security payments in the past several years.”
There are just under 8 million people who receive disability benefits. Summing over 4 years would give approximately 30 million disability years of benefits. The GAO report identifying 1,500 federal workers who received benefits would imply 3,000 per years of improper benefits, assuming an average of 2 years of benefits per worker. This is equal to 0.01 percent of the beneficiaries of the program.
A mistake of this magnitude would warrant little or no attention in a newspaper reporting issues that affected people’s lives in any way. However, it is not surprising that it would get substantial attention in a newspaper like the Post, which is on a campaign to cut Social Security and freely uses its news section to advance this agenda.
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