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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."
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
They already were. Nobody noticed.
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.
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
And I'd invade China and only China. Your planet would owe its ass to my planet.
You're wrong. In most disaster movies, there is usually the obligatory 'interference-laden quick-cut TV new reports from around the world section'.
By law this must feature:
The Eiffel Tower, the UK Houses of Parliament, the Taj Mahal and optionally the Sidney Opera House.
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.
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
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the pay ins. it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme. For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you have to keep getting more and more people into the system just to cover the existing payouts and the total projected payout grows without limit. The only growth in payout for Social Security is the result of long term growth of population, and the tax rate is high enough to allow for that. You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people who have just signed up and now expect to be paid off within a few months or years.
Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy. Tell me - when people retire on their savings, doesn't their outgo generally exceed new income? Sure, some of them will eventually exhaust their savings entirely, but we don't announce that all people who retire are bankrupt just because outgo exceeds income, even though that state usually lasts for the rest of that person's life. Social Security enters a temporary period of negative growth, and Social Security is currently owed large amounts because the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress to support the general fund. Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
Who is John Cabal?
Social Security has always been a pay-as-you-go system, regardless of the public's general misconception about it as "savings" or "investment". The current version of it, adopted from the recommendations of the 1983 Greenspan commission, does have the Boomer generation overpay -- but the commission's plan, which Congress promised to follow, was that the rest of the federal government would run a balanced budget, the national debt would slowly roll over into the SS trust fund, and when the Boomers retired those bonds would be paid for by borrowing from the public again. About the time the last of the Boomers died, the SS trust fund and the US public debt would sit where they were in the mid 1980s, adjusted for population, inflation, and productivity gains. Except for the balanced budget part, things are playing out very close to the commission's forecasts.
After the Boomers, the system reverts to complete pay-as-you-go, requiring a stable 6.2% of GDP. Everyone's forecasts for outlays shows them to be stable, from the SSA itself to the most conservative think tanks. Unfortunately, the commission assumed that future gains from productivity would be shared across the entire spectrum of income; if that had happened, the debate we would be having today would be regarding a permanent small adjustment of the SS tax rates down. But the productivity gains for the last 20 years have been largely captured by those making more than the SS cap, so are not being taxed. A small change in the cap formula, phased in over a decade, would erase the problem entirely.
Productivity gains are why it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you don't include such gains, you simply get the wrong answer.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud -- people are promised their money goes into X and makes a return but it really doesn't. Is this happening?
I agree with the brother poster that the crank theory that the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle. It's not, it's much more like an insurance risk pool. People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
(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?