What would a national ID card get you for reducing voting fraud, SS fraud and Medicare fraud (I assume that's what you were saying) that a driver's license wouldn't?

I'm not being sarcastic. Until recently, I didn't have a valid passport, and I don't know where my Social Security card is. I can produce a birth certificate, and a driver's license, and that's about it for ID. If they want me to produce a bunch of stuff to get the driver's license, I don't know how I'd do that.

The problem is that there are all sorts of other reasons to need a national ID card, which have nothing to do with driving. State drivers licenses are de facto ID cards, although that is not literally what they are. (Hence the fuss about giving them to illegal immigrants.)

That was my understanding from the NPR story. The states are fighting the bill, because the burden will fall onto them to do the leg work in making sure that all the documents were accurate.

I read somewhere that it's always easy to get fake documentation. Every single time the process changes, the forgers are able to figure it out. And that's just for kids getting fake IDs to drink.

This is sarcasm right? Do you really need me to outline the obvious.

Congress legislated a national patient identifier in 1996 in HIPAA, but everyone keeps on putting off implementing it. I have serious doubts that it will ever happen. The biggest benefit for a national patient identifier is continuity of care and ease of billing. If we ever get an electronic patient record system off the ground, having a patient identifier will be extraordinarily useful.

Most high dollar Medicare fraud, btw, is on the provider side, not the patient side. National ID isn't going to do anything about upcoding, unbundling, or billing for services that were never delivered.

You want a national ID card? So you go to your local national ID card office, they ask you for six forms of ID and a few weeks later a nice hard plastic card with holograms and fingerprints and imbedded chips and other neato keeno Tom Swifty type stuff arrives in the mail. Presumably, all that great information they got in the process now resides on a database somewhere. You believe that information isn't already available? What info will you get through a national ID card system that isn't already available? The new passports already have fingerprints on them, and will soon have biometric chips, if I understand correctly. If you want to keep track of people, the problem isn't obtaining data - it's that the Feds aren't in the 20th century when it comes to data transmission, sharing and analysis. You think the Feds will be any better than the states when it comes to administering this system? And as RT points out, the forgers are never too far behind the curve.

Now Maybe If We Cut Spending . . .
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...050402134.html

[Tax Receipts $50 Billion higher than anticipated]

Sounds like Larry Franklin had many, many more top-secret documents in his house than Sandy Berger ever did. I'm waiting for the conservative outrage.

Now Maybe If We Cut Spending . . .
 

God-damned AMT.

So, the trick is to convince them of the truth: That step was already taken through the Patriot act and DHS.

Now Maybe If We Cut Spending . . .
 

In a way, yes. But realistically, it makes more sense to scrap the regular income tax, and make everyone pay the AMT. It's a lot more simple, and the marginal rates are lower.

Of course, in a few years, a bunch of exemptions and deductions will creep back in, but at least for a bit it's better than what we have.

Your papers, please.
 

Fuckers. Absolutely not. This is America, not Mittle-europe (and I am serious). The SC decision in that case out of Wyoming, or wherevever, still pisses me off -- the one that says you have to tell a cop who you are or get arrested.

Now Maybe If We Cut Spending . . .
 

My sibling claims to be unable to find one of the worksheets for the AMT and, therefore, that the AMT is not understandable.

I'm just saying.

On the plus side for you AMT-haters, apparently whatever advisory council the Admin has working to make a recommendation at the end of July (or possibly the first of July, but I think the end) is definitely not going to have the AMT in their proposal. On the other hand, they also apparently are supposed to be proposing a flat tax that is revenue-neutral. We'll see how *that* pans out. At least it might publicize how much more "regular" people will have to pay in taxes if there is a "fair" flat tax.

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Here we go. To state the painfully obvious, the best way to ferret out fraud is cross referencing. Right now there are many people that use mulitple Social Security numbers for various reasons. There is no picture that comes with the Social Security cards so it is really hard to pick them out. The voter registration is also not cross referenced against social security numbers. When someone dies there information is not automatically passed to the voter rolls or the social security administration, or anywhere for that matter. If there was one central ID card for all government stuff, then it would be easy to require that all deaths be reported to that system. That would automatically clear all the old social security numbers and the dead people on voter rolls. IN addition, you would get one when you were born and therefore would not have to get a social security card later or any other ID later. As far as voting, everyone would already be registered, therefore ending all that registration nightmare. When you moved and re-registered, your old registration would automatically be deleted when you re-registered, preventing the tens of millions of double registrations in this country. In addition, all medical history etc would be correlated in one place that would be availabe to a physician when he or she needs to provide emergency medicine. Everyone has been complaining about multiple forms of ID, but with a national ID card, with a picture and fingerprint, you would only need one form of ID for everything. Most developed nations have national ID cards and it clears up all these problems and more. I had a national ID when I lived in Japan, and it was the only form of ID I ever had to show for anything I ever did. Every other resident and citizen had the same thing. You really can't see the problem of having multiple ID systems, with different requirements.

You have a lot of faith in computers.