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Comment by _pastel | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone give me some intuition into why 77k people are employed by the Social Security Administration? [1] That's bigger than Google, and I didn't think their scope was that wide.

[1] http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?compariso... under "Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity". The combined count is "n/a" - maybe that's because the State & Local count has some overlap with the Federal count? So I took the maximum of the two.

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"Bigger than Google" isn't an interesting metric. A better comparison would be to other insurance companies: Progressive Insurance has ~30k, Allstate ~43k, and State Farm ~70k.

Roughly half of Social Security's workforce consists of insurance administrators, who respond to and adjudicate claims and set individual citizens up with their benefits. Unlike State Farm, basically every American interfaces in some way with Social Security.

Again, an example of how a site full of numbers and line graphs can mislead by failing to provide context, while pretending to present a complete picture.

It seems to me that we could eliminate a lot of that overhead if we stopped pretending that Social Security is insurance and just gave every retiree the same benefit. You would still need to keep track of who has reached retirement age, who has died, and where to send the checks, but you could get rid of a lot of arcane rules.

I guess the question is: how much would you save by firing 50k people, and how much would it cost you in claims getting awarded to people without real need?

Firing fifty thousand Social Security Administration employees would likely require the SSA to be the most efficient benefits management organization in the world. 70,000 employees sounds like a lot, but, again: it's roughly in line with comparable commercial organizations.

There are SSA offices all over the country that actually meet people. Lots of older voting public that demands this.

Same reason why we still have post offices in tiny towns.

I think so too. I've been in one. Once the non-internet generation goes away, those offices can go away. Or fold it into the Postal system like they have done with passport applications.

Uh, I don't think it's a case of people being "non-internet". If the needed wires haven't been ran to your locality then you're not "going internet". Further, the postal service is still critical. We might not use it for every day letters anymore, but it service important functions that nothing else can.

~1,230 field offices.

https://www.ssa.gov/org/

More wonderful fact: Government employes 24 million people. This include state and federal and all jobs paid for by government such as teachers. So about 1 in every 6 person works for government.

Number of "people" in the us: 318.9 million (2014) => more like 1 in 13. Also, I'm pretty sure that 24 million figure includes the military.

Only about 150 million americans actually work

[1]https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat08.htm

People who don't work are still people, so the total number of workers has no bearing on the accuracy of the claim that 1/6 people in the US work for the government. The only relevant numbers are the ~24 million government workers and the ~320 million people. Which make the claim false.

s/person works/workers work/ and it's legit. In fact it's closer to 1 in 5 even [1]. ~125M workers, 24M work for the government.

I wonder how many of those think the government should get our of their lives?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...

Have you considered the thousands of problems those people have to solve? The many phone-calls they have do to get people to receive the benefits they are entitled to? Or prevent them from losing them? Google doesn't have to do any of that.

People working in the perimeter of "social work" for the state generally do a lot to help people, who, for whatever reason, are often sabotaging themselves.

They do a lot and in a regional, local way. Google doesn't have to have employees at every city or even in every state. Google also has a relatively narrow focus compared to the SSA. The SSA has to authoritatively interact in a timely manner to births, deaths, citizen naturalizations (term?), and probably a huge amount more. All social security payments come from them, after all.

The laws are byzantine, and often vague. Eligibility decisions have significant effects on people's lives.

For comparison, there are 665k certified practicing accountants in the US.

It might have to do something with efficiency.

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