Well, this item is starting to make its way around the rightward blogs. From what I can tell the gist of it is this:
In calculating the Social Security benefits for people who are currently illegal aliens, but become citizens under one of these various immigration reform bills, their income and contributions to Social Security while illegal would still be counted when determining the benefits for these people.
Now, that is just my reading of this and I could be wrong. But if this is the case, there sure seems to be alot of outrage over what will likely amount to a small amount of money…maybe several billion paid out a couple of decades down the road.
The idea that this is really bad or outrageous in terms of Social Security and its insolvency is mostly a silly outrage given the amount of money that Social Security is estimated to be short (while billions might sound like lots of money, think trillions when talking about the short fall). And compared to President Bush’s Medicare Drug Program it is an even smaller amount of money relatively speaking. And if we were to drag in the short fall in Medicare, well, how does tens of trillions grab ya?
Basically this is not a big deal. And it certainly isn’t extending Social Security to include Mexico. And on the bright side Medicare will probably break us before we even get to the point of paying Social Security to former illegal immigrants who may become citizens.
