By Walt Zlotow
In 2023 undocumented workers contributed $25.7 billion into Social Security, none of which went to the contributors.
How can this be?
Two ways:
- Using a fraudulent social Security Number (SSN): payroll taxes are withheld from their pay cheques and reported to the Social Security Administration (SSA) using that number.
-
Paying with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN): The IRS issues an ITIN to people using a fraudulent or borrowed Social Security Number (SSN). In these cases, payroll taxes are withheld from their pay cheques and reported to the Social Security Administration (SSA) using that number. However, this is for income tax purposes, and an ITIN does not provide eligibility for Social Security benefits.
Impact on the Social Security system? The undocumented workers, by contributing to Social Security but not receiving benefits, contribute a net positive effect on the financial status of the Social Security Trust Fund.
Undocumented workers are pouring tens of billions into the Social Security system, helping keep it solvent, while pouring tens/hundreds of billions into the economy with their purchasing. Why arrest/deport a single one not caught committing a violent or property crime? Political grandstanding using 21st century poorly trained ICE stormtroopers?
Inquiring humanitarians and democratic patriots would like to know.
Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn IL
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It is quite interesting that the one issue that really cut Trump to the bone was in the form of the 1987 words of his hero and mentor, Ronald Reagan.
Not only were the words, from a radio talk given by Reagan, prescient and economically factual but they hit at the foundations of the myth that has bolstered and supported the Trump economic philosophy, echoed by the MAGA hoards: that Tariffs are good for America and for American workers.
Trump has called out the words of Reagan as being fake but, as analysis has shown, they are not fake but reflect the philosophy of that presidential icon of the conservative Right albeit at a point in time when he was considering retaliatory trade measures against Japan. Nonetheless, by highlighting these Presidential fundamentals in an advertisement opposing the imposition of tariffs, the Governor of Ontario has struck a raw nerve with Trump akin to the small boy who told his father ‘this Emperor has no clothes’. Indeed, this Emperor has been peddling a fallacy, an economic fallacy that relies on faulty reasoning, promoting a logically unsound idea as though it were a sound economic theory.
What Reagan said was:
“When someone says: ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports’, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works – but only for a short time. Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer.”
The truth hurts!