TSR ATTACKS! WE CAN HAZ NEW LEGAL THREAT!

[falln_angel]

Pescado is hardly going to go and cry himself to sleep because someone called him an 'asshole'

If we all started calling him a total sweetheart on the other hand... *shifty eyes*

[Paleoanth]

Illegal immigrants who work in the US help shore up the Social Security Trust Fund. They work, their FICA taxes got into it...SNIP

Not the ones that get paid cash under the table, which happens quite often.  I don't know about the ones that have fake SS numbers.

[SBNao]

Illegal immigrants who work in the US help shore up the Social Security Trust Fund. They work, their FICA taxes got into it...SNIP

Not the ones that get paid cash under the table, which happens quite often.  I don't know about the ones that have fake SS numbers.

It's the ones that work using fake or stolen Social Security numbers. It happens a LOT.  There are millions of dollars of 'unaccounted' for wages because of Social Security number fraud, most of those illegals. A lot of them use a fake number until their employer calls them out on it, move someplace else and use another fake number. Or a stolen one.

[Paleoanth]

I looked this up because I hadn't heard of it, and you are right.  However, the illegal immigrants are still costing states more in education and health care than the federal government gets in SS input.  If they could take the faked SS taxes and put them into the states most affected, the states could recover some of the costs that the illegals are putting on the states budgets. 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/11/BUGUII6V1A1.DTL&type=business

"It estimates that school districts educate an estimated 1.8 million undocumented children. At an average cost of $7,500 per student, that amounts to $11.2 billion a year.

"That means roughly half of the education costs of undocumented immigrant children could be met if these Social Security funds could be redirected," the authors say. That's assuming undocumented workers contribute the full $7 billion to the trust fund, which may be an optimistic assumption."

[Ghrenn]

Is anyone else troubled by how entirely off-topic this discussion has become?

[SBNao]

Um...yes. It's a lil off topic. Not by much. Ya know. 

But in response to tomato, Social Security can't take the faked taxes and put them anywhere else but where they are.  When the taxes are taken out, they go directly into the Trust Fund (that part is handled by the IRS and what not).  There's no way of knowing that they're from people who are illegal or from stolen numbers.

The way they end up finding out that the money came from someone who worked illegally is when the information about the wages gets ported over to Social Security. Social Security keeps track of the Social Security numbers and how much the person using that number made. So when the other gov agencies are done putting the taxes into the Trust Fund, they send the information over to Social Security who then says, "Hey! This number isn't a valid number." or "Hey! This person is dead." So THEN they know that the taxes taken from those wages came from someplace funky. You might think that they could alert someone and shunt the money over at that point, but they can't.

Any funny wages that can't be put onto an actual number (ie valid or a living person) is put into a 'suspense' file. They leave the recording of those wages there because we have to allow people the chance to claim those wages. Let me give an example:

Say someone works for a company (Mary Jane) and they put the wrong Social Security number on their paperwork or someone in payroll mixes up a number. It happens all the time. That person works, makes, say 35,000. The taxes from that money get put into the Trust Fund. When the record of those wages gets sent to Social Security, the agency will realize that the number used doesn't really exist so they put the record of the wages in suspense. They can't take out the taxes, because the taxes were already alocated, and for all they know they were earned by someone who was actually legal in the country.

Years later when Mary Jane goes to retire, and the record of her working for those years is missing, Social Security has to go into that suspense file and put those wages back on her record. That means that the taxes rightfully belong in the Trust Fund to help pay for Social Security. So they can estimate that most of those wages belong to undocumented and illegal workers (and most do, IMO), but because they might POSSIBLY belong to a legal worker in the US, they can't shift the taxes over.

Does that make any sense?

[Feverish]

I came across this the other day:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6814673/
My favorite part:

About 90 percent of the time in cases he's investigated, Utah's Hamp said, the numbers used belong to a real person. But even in the other cases, there's still harm done: the number may be issued in the future, meaning a baby may be born with a surprising financial past.

This happened to someone that I work with.  She only found out that someone was using her social security number when the IRS notified her saying she owed them money. Some lady in Kansas had used her social security number to work. I told her if it were me I'd be on a plane to Kansas ready to cut a bitch.

[SBNao]

Yeah....like I said, the issue is complex. For example, some of those records where a person works thirty different places in a year is actually one person working thirty different places in a year; not thirty people using the same number to work.

[Zazazu]

Note the person's sig - 'MATY Baiter' - so they've come from MATY just to bitch at Pes (bar their other post which was about the Evi fat skinny girl creations)...how charming 

It is a jackass, pure and simple. It was not wanted at MATY, either.

[calalily]

Is anyone else troubled by how entirely off-topic this discussion has become?

Nope.  This is how conversations move in real life, this is how Pescado's forums work.

[Pescado]

Perhaps there would be more room for socialist nanny state policies if the government stopped giving rich people money and applied it elsewhere.

Or we could both stop giving rich people more money AND stop taking people's money. Imagine if you just KEPT more of what you earned and used it for yourself, instead of dumping it on a bloated governmental budget. It's a strange concept, aye, that we might be better off with LESS government everywhere, hrm?

[Paleoanth]

Fair tax! Fair Tax!

[Grotesque Sharonicle]

Perhaps there would be more room for socialist nanny state policies if the government stopped giving rich people money and applied it elsewhere.

Or we could both stop giving rich people more money AND stop taking people's money. Imagine if you just KEPT more of what you earned and used it for yourself, instead of dumping it on a bloated governmental budget. It's a strange concept, aye, that we might be better off with LESS government everywhere, hrm?

Pescado, calalily; you're such idealists.

But seriously; the world is degenerated. Do as many laws or anything that will help people in need as you wish, there will be always a twat politician, that will turn the flow into his/her pocket. Humans are evil and selfish. There's nothing we can do anymore. We're about 6.000 billion by now.... It's too late to fix things.

[calalily]

Perhaps there would be more room for socialist nanny state policies if the government stopped giving rich people money and applied it elsewhere.

Or we could both stop giving rich people more money AND stop taking people's money. Imagine if you just KEPT more of what you earned and used it for yourself, instead of dumping it on a bloated governmental budget. It's a strange concept, aye, that we might be better off with LESS government everywhere, hrm?

Damn libertarians.    I don't deny that almost every single government needs to cut their budgets and cut down on income tax.  But I don't think things are better off with less government - less government means more market, and the market just does not provide.  What is needed is more government accountability, rather than less government.  If there was more transparency, more accountability, then things would be a little better for those at the bottom end of the market.  Those are the people who need the help the most, and with the current USian subsidies, they're not getting it. 

I also don't think that USians would accept some of the over-budgeted things required to be slashed - because they don't understand why those particular things need to be slashed and wouldn't accept the areas of slashing.  Some of the things that need slashing are prison spending, police forces right across the US (you're insanely overpoliced and cop overrepresentation is about 1 to 6 of what you actually need) and decreased military spending.  These three things would send the public into such a tail spin of fear they'd all run around like chickens with their heads cut off, despite the fact that these systems are bloated, corrupt money pits designed to appease the public and keep a lot of people in work.

Fair tax! Fair Tax!

That purports to bring fairness by making a retail sales tax - but with the rise of China and India, and the possibilities of offshore holders of USian companies, that may not be such a good idea into the future.  Mainly because a large amount of revenue would be going overseas, and not in fact be spent in the US.  It also would mean wiping out tariffs - adding the possibility that a lot of American industries would die in the arse.

Pescado, calalily; you're such idealists.

Hmm. Don't know that I'm an idealist - I don't think I will ever totally get my way, barring going back in time to the mid 70s. I just have strong political views. 

[Anyerfillag]

It is a jackass, pure and simple. It was not wanted at MATY, either.

What a loser! Yawn, move on please - some lurker/newbie telling a board how to run themselves isn't going to make them liked or welcome!