Ben Shapiro: “We are not actually paying 360 year-olds their Social Security benefits”
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From the March 5, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): And what's smart about this is that the total, sort of, bottom-line cuts that he's talking about are not a gigantic percentage of the American budget. I mean, let's be clear about this. I've said this a thousand times, I will say it a thousand more. In order to get America's debt problem under control, you're gonna have to touch the third rail of American politics. No one wants to do that. But what President Trump was doing last night was incredibly smart politically because Americans have two simultaneous positions. One, they don't want cuts to any of these major welfare programs. And two, they want cuts. So what he's doing is he's identifying cuts, but not touching the things that Americans actually don't want touched, which is smart. And just as a political matter, it's incredibly smart and, by the way, extraordinarily funny. And Democrats are sitting there all sour-faced. Like, how do you not laugh at this? Like, are you in favor of teaching guinea pigs how to transgender themselves in Romania? Like, is that a thing that you're, like, huge on? Is it super duper important or what?
And then President Trump got into a litany of talk about waste and fraud in Social Security. Now at this point, I'll point out it was it was very funny. I do want to point out that we are not actually paying 360 year-olds their Social Security benefits. That's not actually what's going on. Basically, we have an incredibly stupid system for processing Social Security payments in which all the listings are really, really old, and there's, like, a default date that you list somebody's age at if you don't actually know their age that goes back to 1875 or something. There's actually been an audit of Social Security. There are people who are fraudulently obtaining Social Security, but it is not tens of millions of people who are obtaining fraudulent Social Security. It was, however, a reminder that that America's government is filled with with kind of inanities and stupidity.