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Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse
matty619 writes "An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half-billion-dollar upgrade won't be ready until 2015. One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to a report (PDF) by the SSA's Inspector General. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center — built in 1979 — as the SSA's 'primary IT investment' in the next few years."
So the world will end in 2012!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.
Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!
Just use facebook ID's instead.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
In a related story, it has been reported that top officials at the Social Security Administration are prepared to reduced the entire Social Security System to a Web App and run it on the Amazon Cloud.
It already is and that's the problem.
Instead they should try running it like a government. You need at least enough people to watch the contractors or they rob you blind.
Endless red tape is not a feature of government versus private enterprise. It's actually sometimes far worse in very large private enterprises and there is usually little or nothing to catch the inevitable petty or major corruption. Badly run private enterprise can look just as bad or far worse than badly run government, and on some levels they are indistinguishable. Look at Australia's Telstra under Trujillo as a shining example of a business that could not possibly fail due to it's monopoly status but that didn't stop it trying to fail in so many ways.
When it takes in less revenue than it pays out, it will already be insolvent. The "surplus" was "invested" in treasure bonds. Who do you think pays those back..
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
They gather that data to verify eligibility and calculated benefit payout. Don't you get an annual statement listing what you earned for the past X years and if you were to become disabled you would get Y dollars per month, etc? I just got my annual statement on Friday.
They send this out annually because if the food store that I worked at in 1991 forgot to credit me with that income, its a heck of a lot easier to set the record straight in 1992 rather than waiting for me to retire or become disabled decades later and ooops I haven't paid in enough "fully qualified" years for whatever benefit.
Also if someone steals your SS number and works under it, you can trivially figure out how much money they earn, which is interesting.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.
Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk? The goal of S.S. was to make people 'feel' like it's something you have to work towards. (Maybe at the time the ponsi scheme looked like it might work indefinitely). But how would people survive up to age 65 if they didn't already work. So what's the charade all about then? Just give them a reasonable retirement amount from the general tax fund, and require a 10% min tax rate on every working citizen and you're done. Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.
-Michael
It is only a ponzi scheme now because Congress continually increased the number of straws sucking money out of the system. All they need do is increase the age at which you can withdraw benefits. Unless of course you think a society should send all its blue hairs out to the desert to die away from everyone else.
It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
No, that's a stupid way to fix the system.
The actual way to fix the system is to raise or even remove the income cap.
Or just raising rates by 2% or whatever. Or means testing.
Idiots looking at the social security system and claiming it's about to be 'broke' and we should give up on it are like idiots looking at a gas gauge in a bus and claiming we're almost out of gas so we should get out and walk.
We're only going to run out of gas only if morons repeating over and over 'social security is broke' actually manage to elect enough navigators to keep us from stopping at a fucking gas station and buying more gas.
The rich, in this analogy, own a taxi service, aka, the stock market, where they wish people would spend their money instead.
Rich people: 'Social security is broken because there's a very minor problem with it that will cause issues in a few decades, we should get rid of it.' Young people: 'I heard that people think social security won't be there when we retire, so I'm all for doing away with it.' Chorus: 'Social security is going to die because we're going to kill it, so we should kill it.'
It's the most goddamn absurd attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy I've ever seen. And the real joke is that everyone desperately wants people to forget the alternative was 'letting people invest in the stock market', so if we'd actually privatized social security back when Bush wanted to it, we'd have lost all that money. And if, instead, we'd have invested in 'safe' bonds and stuff...we'd still have lost that money, because the damn bond rating places were criminally asleep at the wheel the last decade and giving perfect ratings to utter shit packages of loans.
So now, hilariously, no one actually mentions where we'd invest this retirement money instead of social security. They're going to wait a decade and then start pimping giving it to the rich, um, I mean, investing in the stock market, and hope we forget what happened this last decade.
So, the next time you hear an idiot talk about 'private retirement accounts', ask them what you think we should let people invest in. And then pretend they started invest in that in 2000, and see how well the market did.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
(Doubling up here for the quoted part)
1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong.
2. If he's paying on 8 months, that's about an 8.3% rate, compared to the poorest workers making only 10 or 20 K a year, who are paying 12.5%. He's complaining about being taxed at a lower rate than the poorest people who have a job at all. Whaaaaahhhhhh! Tell, me, I'm 6''5", 250 lbs can bench press 480 (Kilos), and personally kicked Bruce Lee's, John Claude van Damme's and Chuck Norris' asses at the same time, beating them severely with Kurt Russell in his Snake Pliskin suit, and I own my own nuclear weapons for defense, so why do as much of my taxes go for police protection as some fat neckbeard's (Disclaimer: Not really, on any of that - Disclamer 2: If you did somehow believe all that BS, I also want to sell a nice bridge cheap, you'll make loads of money.). Oh, and I come from a very long lived family, why aren't my insurance rates lower than everyone else's? I do better work than any of my coworkers, why am I in the same paygrade? Whaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!
Who is John Cabal?
You're offering only part of what defines a Ponzi scheme. Using that very brief and incomplete definition, most of what people invest their money in for retirement is a Ponzi scheme. Let's consider some other characteristics that define a Ponzi scheme.
Ponzi schemes offer large short term returns that are abnormally high or consistent. Social security doesn't.
Ponzi schemes require an ever increasing amount of money to continue paying off past investors. Social security has a temporary problem from the large number of boomers, but social security can be, and has been, modified in the past to reflect changes in the size of the taxpaying workforce and the number of beneficiaries. Once the boomer bump is over social security will stabilize.
Ponzi schemes don't reveal the method by which they generate their great short term results. Social security is transparent as to where the money is coming from, where it's invested and who receives benefits. It's what it claims to be, a mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their income, with no promise of huge payouts.
Ponzi schemes typically don't invest any of the money people invest in it. Money paid into social security is invested in U. S. government securities. Social security owns trillions of dollars of US securities. Social security owns more US government securities than China.
It might be able to complete transactions, but not in a timely manner. If social security checks didn't go out on time there'd be a political shit storm that would make the tea party seem tame.
A decade ago, I did work on updating the system at the 'California Board of Pest Control'. They had a system that had "collapsed". What it looked like was an office that had stopped buying cubicle walls. They instead had built their walls from stacks of paper that had to be processed. They literally had walls made of stacked paper. I will say it a third time just because the image in my head was so startling. They had made the internal walls of the office out of 12' tall stacks of paper. When I displayed shock at what I saw, they explained that this was just the new stuff that they hadn't gotten moved to the big warehouse across the street. It looked a lot like one of those houses you see on the news where the owner went insane, and become a hard core pack rat.
This strikes me as a task comparable to the Y2K crisis, which was handled well enough that the vast majority of the sheeple believe it to have been a scam, a tremendous waste of time, money, and urgency that was all for naught.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The major differences between this and the Y2K crisis is that the politically-dominated government, and not profit-minded enterprises, is responsible for dealing with the problem. And so we are likely to see government gridlock drive us straight into a collapse of the system that would have been paying out a huge chunk of the spending money to just about the largest demographic group in the country -- those age 60-something-and-over, with the resultant impact on the economy triggering an economic crisis that will be truly stupendous to behold.
Consider the alternative: an economy that is strapped for reasonable-paying jobs, hires a bunch of the near-retiring or retired boomer coders, delaying their retirements and generating additional cash flows into the economy. We get a smooth transition to a SS system (hardware and software) that is capable up supporting the huge demographic bubble of the boomers, that also happens to lessen the impact of an abrupt boomer retirement. This covers more than mere coders, as the planning and logistics and setup of a number of fault-tolerant fail-over capable data centers employs a lot more than just coders and analysts.
And Obama says he can't find any "shovel-ready" jobs.
How did they go broke in 2008? I owned stocks in 2008, they are worth more today then they were then.
Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that real estate was in a bubble and avoid those.
Even if you didn't avoid those, again they don't make up 100% of your holdings.
Yes people who are retiring int the short to medium term shouldn't have all their money in long term investment vehicles - that's not even common sense, that's just not being retarded.
OK.
The DOW.
Let's say it's $10,000 a year (the number doesn't matter since you can just multiply anyway).
And you are a spectucalarly stupid investor who buys all $10,000 on one day and that day always happens to be the highest day for the DOW that year.
So how does your investment perform (total is how many DJIA "units" we own in total):
year: 2000, DJIA: 11722.98, total: 0.85
year 2001, DJIA: 11337.92, total: 1.74
year 2002, DJIA: 10635.25, total: 2.68
year 2003, DJIA: 10453.92, total: 3.63
year 2004, DJIA: 10854.54, total: 4.55
year 2005, DJIA: 10940.55, total: 5.47
year 2006, DJIA: 12510.57, total: 6.27
year 2007, DJIA: 14164.53, total: 6.97
year 2008, DJIA: 13058.20, total: 7.74
year 2009, DJIA: 10548.51, total: 8.69
year 2010, DJIA: 11585.38, total: 9.55
The DJIA closed at 11,674.76 last week, so our investment is worth $111,487.51. So basically unchanged (up $1,487.51 over what we invested), with the absolutly worst case investment plan (buy the yearly high).
But of course we've been earning dividends as well (though admitedly since the DJIA isn't very "I" anymore it's not really the place to be seeking dividends). Of course the DJIA is currently amazingly overvalued and propped up by the Fed yet again, hence low dividends and a pretty good chance of a big drop again.
That's just a stupid requirement. In the first half of my working life I don't give care if it goes down by 50% one day, as long as it comes back up. When I'm actually retiring I likely have it all in bonds anyway - essentially what SS is 100% government bonds. Being able to have more swings early on is verry useful.
And yes I could lose it all. Not having low income pensions/etc funded by general revenue (i.e. not a promise to people to magically invest their money and payouts to the rich because they paid in as well) would be a bad combination.
And the DOW is a pretty stupid place to put your money - though note that your "obviously, is not a good idea" place is actually up over that timeframe (hooray for inflation).