That might sound like a lot of money, but the agency’s overhead is legendarily low: administrative expenses come to just 0.5% of the total cost of the program, well below the overhead of 401(k) programs and most state and local government pensions.
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Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong. While COBOL’s origins date to 1959, it’s an actively maintained programming language, with an updated standard published by the International Standards Organization in 2023.
The advanced age of actively maintained languages is evidence of their sustainability and quality. Many “modern” languages are quite old: C is 52 years old, Python is 34
and even JavaScript will turn 30 this year. COBOL remains so widely used in our financial system that 95% of ATM transactions rely on it. There are 220 billion lines of COBOL in use today. Why? Mostly because it’s really good at processing large amounts of business data.
Critics also complain that mainframes are antiquated in an era of cloud computing. In fact, mainframes are still in wide use throughout the public and private sectors.
They excel anywhere that it’s important to have lots of processing power, high redundancy and the ability to muscle through big batches of data processing—precisely what the SSA needs.
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