Hacker News Reader

Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

$79.1 billion over 10 years was "wasted" as fraud and other "should not have paid", according to the Social Security administration.

That's 5,273 people like me getting $15,000,000.

> It's this "this is cheap compared to the value it provides" has analogs in coupon clipping shopaholics: "you don't understand, it was 50% off!" Right, but it still cost money, a significant amount.

this is the main thrust. Sure, it's like a dime to the government. have you ever heard the phrase "nickel and dimed"? How many "$15 million dollar" nickels do you need to stack before it becomes a culture problem in the federal government?

It's thinking like you espoused in that last sentence that lead to waste and fraud. "it's like a dime compared to our budget, what's the big deal?"

there's a lot of dimes.

View on HN

Social security pays out $1.5 trillion a year. If only $8 billion a year is lost to fraud, that means fraud is 0.5%.

It's impossible to design a system with zero fraud, but keeping it under 0.5% is very impressive.

We've moved the goalposts. 0.5% here, 0.5% there, what's it matter, it's very impressive that it's so low. I mentioned the SSA budget errors because it's $15,000,000 five thousand times over.

I still have to pay for that 0.5%. A nickel here, a dime there. Maybe it can be argued that spending $15,000,000 to "own the CCP" is worth it. After all, it's only a dime per taxpayer.

Harassing the CCP (and any other government we "owned") means that we also need to spend 800 billion on Defense.

okay now do it for these numbers from 2021-2023:

> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.

> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:

> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.

> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.

> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.

i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.

please.

SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...

I'm done with all of you.

Why are you one of the lucky 5000 to get 15million? What your saying make no sense. Your number of 79 billion, would actually be $50/ tax payer/ per year for 10 years. So like one or two free dinners?

So idk what you mean its a lot of dimes.

> How many "$15 million dollar" nickels

Its 4 million "nickles", you can do the math to get to 6 trillion. 15 million is 0.00025% of what is spent per year. You need to save 15 million dollars, millions of times to do anything significant to amount being spent.

You going on about coupons doesn't really make sense here, the amounts aren't significant. Again because people think about large amounts of money how it applies to them personally without being able to grasp what actually gets spent by large organizations. Its like when someone posts here about saving 10k in AWS spend, when their company does millions in revenue and the engineer cost at least 100/hour

> when someone posts here about saving 10k in AWS spend, when their company does millions in revenue and the engineer cost at least 100/hour

So if you have a bunch of machines you don't need anymore on AWS, you just leave them on, because it's only 0.5% of the total AWS spend? nevermind the potential attack surface of machines that aren't being actively maintained, are still connected to your other services, and so on?

Have you never heard the phrase "nickel and dimed"? Each individual "$15,000,000" is insignificant to a taxpayer. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of such "it's only $0.10 per taxpayer" adds up. If i have a million dimes, i can buy a nice car.

Nickel and dimed is just an expression and if you account for inflation probably is the equivalent of 5 dollars now

You can't grasp how big these numbers are

If you save 15 million dollars every day for a year you get about 5 billion

5 billion of the $6 TRILLION spent every year is 0.09% of the total amount spent

For the next 4 years if you cut $15 million every day from somewhere its still only 0.36%. A third of a percent!

6 trillion minus 20 billion is still about 6 trillion.

That hypothetical $5 billion a year in the best case would reduce the taxes needed by 26 dollars per tax payer on average per year.

okay now do it for these numbers from 2021-2023:

> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.

> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:

> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.

> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.

> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.

please.

SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...

I'm done with all of you.

p.s., to you specifically, 6 trillion minus 350 billion is not 6 trillion.

> That's 5,273 people like me getting $15,000,000.

That's also each American citizen getting... $23.27 each year for 10 years.

People are just awful at conceptualizing large numbers. Assuming that number is accurate, $7.9 billion is wasted in the process of delivering $1.6 trillion in 2024. Waste and loss scales with the work being done, it doesn't care that you got sticker shock.

I challenge you to find anything you do in your day with greater than 99.5% efficiency. You waste a higher percentage of the food you eat, stuck to the pan.

Turns out it was actually 5.42%, and $750,000,000,000.00 between 2021 and 2023.

I certainly try not to leave 1/20th of my food in the pan!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com