You Should Know

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But I have good news for you, I heard that they are dismantling the IRS 😂👌

Where are you keeping your social security card that it keeps getting stolen? Is it in your wallet or in your house somewhere and your getting broken into a whole bunch?

It's not supposed to be an identifier, but since it's the only nationally-assigned designation all citizens get it's treated like one.

Which is stupid. It's incredibly insecure, vitally important, leaked to every bad actor on the planet already, and unchangeable when it gets compromised (which it has been).

Yes, but in that typically bonkers American way you also have to keep it secret (so nobody can steal your identity), while at the same time revealing it to every Tom, Dick and Harry every time you have to prove your identity.

Yes, sort of, but in a stupid way. The number is treated as a unique identifier of a person, but you don't carry it around since it's so insecure.

Yesn't.

In a nutshell, Social Security is a government run pension/retirement savings system. With a few exceptions you can look up on your own if you're curious, every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income. Each person in the system, so basically everyone working a job in the US, gets an account number, their Social Security Number.

For awhile after the system started, you'd get your SSN when you got your first job. At some point, they introduced a tax credit for parents with children, if you had a child you could deduct them on your taxes. People started claiming they had more kids than they did to pay less taxes. Sure, let's just tell the government we have 12 kids, they won't know we only have 5. The solution to this problem was to require the children being claimed had social security numbers. This had two effects: 1. it got rid of those "paper children," and 2. Signing up for social security and getting a social security number is part of being born; every American now has a serial number, issued on a card.

The kind of people who are ruining our nation right now are opposed to a national ID system because they hate being part of a functioning society. So we don't have a national ID card the way many nations do. State governments issue a number of IDs of various types, the de facto standard for identification in the US is a driver's license. The vast majority of Americans have one. But, not all. The only unique number common to (practically) ALL Americans is a Social Security Number.

Numbers like credit card numbers or sanely designed ID systems have built-in checksums, not every number that fits the regex for a Visa card number is a valid Visa card number. A social security number doesn't have that; it wasn't intended as an ID number, it's an account number, you can tell when and where it was issued by looking at it because it's a serial number. And because most Americans younger than the president were issued their numbers at birth, you can guess a lot of their number based on where and when they were born. The last four digits are a simple serial number...and often used by banks and such as a second factor. "Okay, just tell me your date of birth and the last four of your social." the bank teller will ask you out loud.

It's something we're gonna have to fix after the war.

Most employers will request the original copy to make their own copies from as part of any onboarding process. Just knowing the numbers isn't enough.

I had to get mine replaced to get a passport. That was ten years ago, and the passport just expired. I've got 9 replacements left and I just turned 60, so I think I'm good.