this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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I understand social security to mean paying into a state pension, a national healthcare service, and provision of education.
What does social security mean in the American context?
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. This is a social security card, which displays your social security number, which is the closest thing we have to a national ID. It is used for all things financial and for identity verification & background checks. If someone gets your name, address, and social security number, you can be in for a real bad time.
Which is unfortunately easy to do. There are some of those search sites that include SSNs on them. Haven't seen one that detailed in a few years, but still. Just today I found a site that had addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and relatives. All accurate and all freely available, no registration required.
Especially when Equifax leaked nearly half of all Americans' names, social security numbers, addresses, birthdays, and driver license number in 2017. That info is just out there and we can never remove it.
At least they were punishe... Hahahaha as if.
To add to the problem, social security was never meant to be an national ID number. It was just really useful for a whole lot of things. However, numbers are handed out sequentially, not randomly. So take your SIN and add or subtract one from it and that is another person's SIN. Knowing just a few simple things about a person can reveal most if not their entire SIN.
When I was a food service manager I inexplicably had access to the social security numbers of everyone who had ever applied to work there. Thousands.
Oh no
Depends on who you ask. For millennials and younger, it means paying lots of money into a service that will be dissolved before we get to tap into it.
It's also a number that's supposed to be kept secure or something, but applying for pretty much anything requires you to provide it.
Yeah, it became a sort of federal identification since the US government didn't want to make a federal ID and now we are stuck with a much more inferior system than if they just did anything. Since everyone got a SS card it became the de facto ID.
It was originally just a number to track contributions to quasi-pension system. However, because it was the only number universally assigned to people, it stated getting used way more often, most notably for credit issuers and reporting agencies.
In the US Social Security is retirement income. SS tax comes out of every paycheck then when you retire you will get monthly income. So state pension but none of the other good stuff.
Thanks all for your replies!
It pays the state pension which is good for a tiny fraction of retirement.
Depends what your spending is like. Someone who earns like 30K/year should get about 65% of their earning if they retire at 65. You'd have to save like another $1500/year (including company matches) to make up the difference.
If I kept working til I was like 70 and my pay only keeps up with inflation, I'd get about 130% of my spending via social security.