| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a big legislative package crammed with Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here. Contrary to what Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have you believe, tens of millions of dead people are not collecting Social Security benefits from the grave. Justin Fox says the government is just bad at keeping track of dead people, and it’d cost a lot of money to fix the records: The reasons given by SSA officials have been that adding death information to all the records would cost too much ($5.5 million to $9.7 million, it estimated in 2015), require regulatory changes to carry out, result in the possible release of personal information about still-living people to the agency’s publicly available Death Master File and “be of little benefit to the agency” because few if any payments are going to dead people born before 1920.
Still, he says all those inactive accounts are “easy targets for identity theft.” Hundreds of thousands of people who likely aren’t authorized to work in the US have been using dormant numbers to get jobs. Justin says it “hints at another possible reason the Social Security Administration hasn’t been super-aggressive about clearing dead people … the up to $1.4 billion in payroll taxes on that $11.6 billion in earnings.” Those contributions “basically represent free money for the Social Security Trust Fund,” he writes. That sounds like fraud! But it’s not nearly as clean of a slogan as DEAD PEOPLE STEALING YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY, so. Elsewhere in slogans related to Elon, you have “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING,” which I regret to inform you was plastered all over the US Department of Housing and Urban Development this morning: Rumor has it that some sicko broadcasted what appeared to be an AI-generated video of Trump kissing — or brushing his teeth with?? — Elon Musk’s bare toes. Nobody could reportedly figure out how to get it to stop playing on a loop all throughout the building, including in the cafeteria, so they sent some poor soul to unplug all the televisions. Between that eye-burning video and Musk’s baby mama drama, my zone is thoroughly flooded, as Steve Bannon always intended. But while the DOGE man is waving around chainsaws, firing people and giving those who remain ultimatums over email, far more pressing problems plague the government. Clive Crook says Congress’ budget “is likely to add some $4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.” Matthew Yglesias says that Republican leaders risk angering 80 million Americans by slipping “Medicaid cuts into a big legislative package crammed with other stuff.” And Francis Wilkinson says the courts “have been flooded with cases filed by or against the Trump administration.” One such case? The Associated Press — which refused to add “Gulf of America” to its stylebook, despite Trump's executive order, and stuck with “Gulf of Mexico” — sued the White House Friday after the president personally barred reporters from events. “When politicians silence or sideline reporters, it’s because they want to keep the public in the dark,” Mary Ellen Klas writes. Part and parcel with flooding the zone, I suppose. An incredible 84% of the German electorate turned out to vote in what Katja Hoyer called “the country’s most intensely anticipated election in decades.” Chris Bryant says, “The victory of conservative candidate Friedrich Merz in Sunday’s German election has raised hopes that this 69-year-old former corporate lawyer will wave a magic wand and end years of economic stagnation.” But wave his wand, he cannot: “Following an election campaign dominated by debates about asylum seekers, I worry German voters are unprepared for some of the hard financial choices ahead, which include raising the retirement age and curtailing wasteful health spending,” Chris writes. In a new video, he explains how those changes will further strain the country’s social security system. “Germany’s social protections are renowned for being generous,” he says, but in an era when more people are retiring than entering Germany’s workforce, its social safety net looks increasingly fragile. If Merz fails to get the nation’s economic juices flowing again, John Authers, who watched the election play out from afar, warns the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) could swoop in to save the day. With over one-fifth of the vote, “the far-right party now has the greatest electoral bridgehead for the far-right since the fall of the Nazis,” Authers writes. “Germany’s extremely liberal immigration policies of recent years look ever more like a serious mistake that provoked a deep political realignment.” | 
