I did not know that the US didn’t have an official ID card.
This is from Wikipedia:
All legislative attempts to create a national identity card have failed due to tenacious opposition from liberal and conservative politicians alike, who regard the national identity card as the mark of a totalitarian society.[1]
This leads to another, unrelated problem. Just because we don’t have a universal ID doesn’t mean we don’t need one…and almost have one.
Social Security. Our government run mandatory pension/welfare system the fascists are going to plunder and destroy. Social Security is paid for essentially by an income tax, there’s a line item deduction from your paycheck. Used to be you’d sign up for Social Security and get issued a Social Security number when you got your first job, because that’s when you become relevant to the Social Security office. Until the government issued a tax deduction for parents of children. Which caused people to file their taxes claiming to have way more children than they did. The solution the government used was to require the children be registered with Social Security to claim the tax deduction. This solved the problem of “paper children” and also meant that with a few exceptions every citizen of America would be issued a Social Security Number shortly after birth. Mine absolutely is not 457-55-5462.
So, we have a situation where America does not issue a mandatory citizen ID card, but you are assigned a badly designed yet permanent account number, and often that is forced to do. They print them on plastic now, but a social security card used to be a slip of paper with your SSN and name printed on it alongside the words NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION. It isn’t periodically re-issued, mine was printed in the late 80’s shortly after I was. It’s both bad and common practice to use the SSN as a personal ID number, especially at banks, the very trailing edge of information security.
I did not know that the US didn’t have an official ID card.
This is from Wikipedia:
This leads to another, unrelated problem. Just because we don’t have a universal ID doesn’t mean we don’t need one…and almost have one.
Social Security. Our government run mandatory pension/welfare system the fascists are going to plunder and destroy. Social Security is paid for essentially by an income tax, there’s a line item deduction from your paycheck. Used to be you’d sign up for Social Security and get issued a Social Security number when you got your first job, because that’s when you become relevant to the Social Security office. Until the government issued a tax deduction for parents of children. Which caused people to file their taxes claiming to have way more children than they did. The solution the government used was to require the children be registered with Social Security to claim the tax deduction. This solved the problem of “paper children” and also meant that with a few exceptions every citizen of America would be issued a Social Security Number shortly after birth. Mine absolutely is not 457-55-5462.
So, we have a situation where America does not issue a mandatory citizen ID card, but you are assigned a badly designed yet permanent account number, and often that is forced to do. They print them on plastic now, but a social security card used to be a slip of paper with your SSN and name printed on it alongside the words NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION. It isn’t periodically re-issued, mine was printed in the late 80’s shortly after I was. It’s both bad and common practice to use the SSN as a personal ID number, especially at banks, the very trailing edge of information security.