Immigration
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| Gold |
We're talking directly about immigration in this article. Really. But plain talk about fleecing peasants first requires a definition of a fancy term. Seigniorage, also spelled seignorage, or seigneurage -- who cares -- originally defined a fee which governments charged for milling coins out of precious metal. That was fair enough, because it was common to shave the side or surface of coins and gather up the dust for sale, so clever serration of the edges or elaborate artwork on the flat surface eliminated the need to be forever weighing coins to detect cheats.
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| immigration |
In time, however, governments kept the precious metal in vaults and issued paper currency, some of which inevitably got burned, shredded or lost. Since the issuing government could then keep the whole value of the currency minus printing costs for itself, the term seigniorage transferred to this new meaning. There might be a temptation for governments to print money on fragile paper, except that it was even more important to make it hard to counterfeit. But this sort of seigniorage never seemed offensive because everybody agrees that if you have money in your pocket, shame on you if you lose it. As currency exchanges have become more sophisticated however, some arrangements which loosely fit the definition of seigniorage have become a source of moral dismay. One facet of currency razzle dazzle concerns immigration, which is itself always a contentious matter.
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| Spanish |
Right now, it is authoritatively estimated that the Social Security program has collected half a trillion dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes, whose rightful owner is impossible to determine. Some of the beneficiaries may have died without claiming the money, so some of this topic might be classified as escheat. But very likely the bulk of this money was withheld from illegal immigrants by their employers, either without their knowledge or using counterfeit social security numbers, and their fugitive status made them reluctant to claim it. Half a trillion is five hundred billion dollars.
This sort of discovery leads to some thought on a theoretical level. If the immigrants are legal, or if illegal receive amnesty, they will receive social security benefits. You might say they earned such benefits, but our tormented public pension system is almost entirely funded by one generation funding its parents' generation. That enjoys the politician spin-term of "pay as you go". An American multi-generational citizen has paid for his parents while he works, and expects to have his own pension paid for by his children. An immigrant, never mind the legality of his citizenship, is paying the same taxes, but has no parents as beneficiaries. When he retires he may be a burden to his children, but his current payments have gone into the black hole of government deficits without paying for any parents. The total amount of money diverted from the usual channels is calculated to be two trillion dollars, or four times as much as the seigniorage matter. Just for comparison, consider that America is estimated to have 900 billionaires. Their aggregate net worth is probably not much greater than the amount our government garners from illegal immigrants.
The matter really does seem to be important enough for us to learn how to spell the term.
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