politics

one year on and the documents about my employment history have not yet been received. (want to re-iterate that i just applied for a copy of my work history including earnings and employer name, i'm not applying to get an SSN or for benefits). DOGE took a hammer to the SSA so sadly this delay isn't unexpected... but definitely worth re-iterating that if this could have helped Harris, it wouldn't have been possible for these to come in time.

just posting the one year follow up to this in case anyone is still watching (or in the future if someone wants to try what i did - in the latter case, to follow for further updates, go to https://fedia.io/m/AmerExit/t/2379602/Australian-Computer-Society-assessment )

it also points to the following possibility to do things better in the future - right now presidential candidates (with the one stupid exception) are generally seen as needing to comply with the norm of releasing their tax returns from the IRS.

perhaps going forward, it would be best if presidential and vice presidential candidates should also apply for and obtain their employment history from the SSA. since getting a campaign set up usually starts a couple of years early, this would mean that the required documents are available before the election is held. (likewise, even in a re-election year, perhaps a primary should always be held anyways, to make sure that the president and VP are in fact re-electable.)

edit: someone who wanted to remain anonymous DM'd me about this, and i thought a couple of items were worth addressing publicly.

point one - did the OC (original commenter who i responded to, basically the thread starter) lie about being able to get history from the SSA?

after all, you can't. from the online link, https://secure.ssa.gov/ec2/eligibility-earnings-ui/earnings-record , you can only see earnings but not employer name. for the non-americans among us, here are publicly available screenshots of what this looks like, https://www.socialsecurityintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/earningsrecord.jpg.webp & https://ssa.tools/calculator & https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialSecurity/comments/l45u64/earnings_record_problem/

but, this is quite a serious claim, and thus would require serious evidence. Both Occam's and Halon's razor require us to consider alternative explanations first.

i don't know why [email protected] @[email protected] has never responded to this, but this person does deserve the benefit of the doubt here. elsewhere, see https://lemmy.world/comment/12783783 , the OC claims to be a disabled veteran. i can't rule out that, at least pre-DOGE, there was a view on SSA's website where you could see these docs if you were either disabled, a veteran, or both. since the OC can't change the status of the OC (can't click a button and say you're no longer a veteran, for example), the OC might have had no way of knowing that for nonveteran and nondisabled folks the SSA doesn't provide the same documents. (unless the SSA had big red text on the front of the page saying "THIS IS ONLY AVAILABLE IF YOU ARE A DISABLED VETERAN" which seems unlikely to me in the extreme.)

most likely this would have taken the form of submitting supporting documents to prove one is disabled or a vet (or a disabled vet if both are required) which would have included sending a copy of docs from your old employers/ this might have a relatively short time after the OC left McDonalds (say less than seven years post-leaving), and thus copies the records were still easily obtainable from banks and the IRS.

the softer version here is that the OC is still being honest but make an unintentional mistake and obtained the history from the Dept. of Vet. Affairs website or something instead of from the SSA, and simply got the specific gov't agency wrong.

finally, i can't rule out that due to some SSA website glitch, the OC was able to see employer name and all that from https://secure.ssa.gov/ec2/eligibility-earnings-ui/earnings-record despite it officially not being possible (even in the pre-DOGE days).

point two - isn't the OC showing an anti-Harris bias here, by lying and claiming that it was easy for Harris to get proof of working at McDonalds from the SSA when it isn't?

another serious claim that requires serious evidence. in fact, i'd say that can't be the case unless the OC was knowingly lying about that point. rather, if the OC was truthful or at least unintentionally mistaken, then there's a different and more reasonable explanation.

we need to hold our leaders and politicians to account. if they say something untruthful, it needs to be called out immediately. so - provided that the OC believed that the statements were truthful - the OC was simply performing a necessary civic duty here.

it was just a shame that, since Harris is neither disabled or a veteran, she likely wouldn't have been able to obtain the proof quickly like the OC did.