This month I’ve become so old that even the federal government is fine paying me benefits until I die, because it shouldn’t be that long.
It used to be you got Social Security benefits when you turned 65. Now, it’s 66. In 12 years, the target will move to 67. Your elected representatives took your payments into Social Security and spent them on knick knacks, Cuban cigars, booze, limos and bail, so they could say the system was in trouble and people have to wait for the benefits they were promised.
People everywhere fall for this scam, so much so that the word “entitlement” now is widely believed to mean exactly the opposite of what it really does mean. Entitlement actually means something that you deserve, not something you don’t. If you are entitled to something you have a right to it. Everyone who pays into Social Security has a right to it.
It would be as if you bought a dining room set on a layaway plan, and when the last payment was made, the store said, “You know what? We spent a bunch of the money you’ve paid so far buying our kids’ sneakers, so to make up for that you have to keep paying us a few more months.”
Speaking of government cheats, you’d think people who make you fill out a 41-page application for security clearance would keep the application itself secure?
Doesn’t it make sense that people who make you prove that you can be trusted with secrets would themselves try extra hard at being trustworthy?
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has now let slip data, including names and Social Security numbers, and possibly family names and Social Security numbers, from more than 21 million such applications.
All of these people may have lost their ID to one guy in China who is about to move to Maine, call himself Whittaker Walt and hundreds of other names, rent whole apartment buildings and collect millions in Social Security.
It didn’t used to be like this.
When my mother left the farm for civil-service work during the Great Depression, she had a problem. No birth certificate.
The building her birth certificate had been kept in, in her hometown, had burned down. As if that wasn’t enough, the town turned into a ghost town.
Today, my mother probably couldn’t get ID. But in the 1930s, it was just a matter of getting her mom and dad to sign a document under oath attesting to the fact that she was indeed born at such and such place and time. That was accepted in lieu of a birth certificate issued at the time of birth.
The government trusted that the mother would know her own daughter and where she gave birth to her.
The fix that we are in now is less that we can’t trust the government, as that our government no longer trusts any of us.
Everyone is a suspect.
If my mother were alive, and I could get her into the Department of Licensing to tell them I am who I say I am, they’d suspect her of lying.
The inability to trust is self-perpetuating.
The less people are trusted the more the government relies on ID. Having ID becomes a substitute for relationships that trust depends on.
The result is a system that is preventing itself from recognizing many of its own people.
There are millions of Americans today who don’t have to fear having their ID stolen, because they can’t get ID in the first place, including a large percentage of homeless people who are unable to get ordinary wage paying jobs as a result.
If we had real homeland security, it would include provisions to put an end to that.
We shouldn’t let fear blind us to our own fellow citizens.