LOL -- A warning from Napolitano

[Riot]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090202673.html

Selected excerpts:

How illegal immigrants are helping Social Security

In response to a research inquiry for a book I am writing on the economics of immigration, Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and someone who enjoys bipartisan support for his straightforwardness, said that by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of somewhere between $120 billion and $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants.

That represented an astounding 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent of the trust fund's total assets of $2.24 trillion that year. The cumulative contribution is surely higher now. Unauthorized immigrants paid a net contribution of $12 billion in 2007 alone, Goss said.

"If for example we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country over the past," Goss e-mailed me, "then these numbers suggest that we would have entered persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover [payouts] starting [in] 2009, or six years earlier than estimated under the 2010 Trustees Report."

The Social Security actuaries estimate that two-thirds of unauthorized immigrant workers, or 5.6 million people, were paying into the system in 2007. Roughly half used a Social Security number tied to an invented name or one that belonged to someone else. Of the rest, many got legal cards when they entered the country under a temporary work visa. They stayed illegally after their visas expired.

About 180,000 unauthorized immigrants received about $1 billion in fraudulent benefits in 2007, Goss said. These benefits are subtracted from the net contribution. Few of the unauthorized workers are likely to receive anything, ever. About the only way they might would be if they were to become legal, and they had paid their withholding taxes using their true names.

The decline in illegal immigration, plus tighter workplace enforcement, means that contributions from the unauthorized will decrease. But as Goss notes, they remain, because of larger families, a positive contributing factor to Social Security solvency.

Somebody ought to say thank you.