Thread

Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks

79 points · 105 comments · speckx

m463 · 1790365757 · focus · HN ↗
I was wondering what this was.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_for_Entitlements" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...
1. delichon · 1790366051 · focus · HN ↗
  You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. -- Milton Friedman
  Turns out you can, but for how long?
  1. goatlover · 1790366162 · focus · HN ↗
    As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
    rattlesnakedave · 1790366658 · focus · HN ↗
    You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
    alwaysthiserror · 1790368419 · focus · HN ↗
    Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
    rattlesnakedave · 1790371167 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually, the even more serious budget analyses than the ones you've read include Social Security
    jjk166 · 1790375192 · focus · HN ↗
    Because the social security surplus was used to fund the treasury instead of being put towards social security. The 1990s budget surplus that became the Bush tax cuts? Yeah that was the money that was supposed to pay for social security.
    alwaysthiserror · 1790387950 · focus · HN ↗
    Surprising. Is that something common in Econ literature or something? It's definitely not the norm in poli sci journals, unless something's changed in the decade or so since I looked at many of those, since it just crowds out and distorts things that do contribute to the deficit.
    It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".

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