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What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Considering there are around 330M citizens right now, I think they ran out already and they’re probably recycling them.
The first SSNs were issued in 1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number
According to the death master file entry in wiki 111x10^6 SSNs died between 1962 and 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Master_File
That's 1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1. Assume that number to be a constant during the period 1936-2024
1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1 x (2024-1936) x year = 174.4 x 10^6 deaths
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States there's 335.9 x 10^6 residents, but I can't tell if they are citizens with SSNs, but I'm going to assume that for now.
So (335.9 + 174.4) x 10^6 is 510.3 x 10^6 spent SSNs.
According to the same demographics wiki article the birth rate is 11 births per 1000 population. Death rate is 10.4 deaths per 1000 population. Because I'm just doing back of the envelope estimation for fun, while trying to manage my hangover in the early afternoon, I'm not going to create an exponential function to describe population growth. Instead I'm going to only consider future the US population a constant and not consider the 200 x 10^3 annual net growth (it only affects the next year's growth by 120 anyway)
With all of that BS out of the way, at the present birthrate the US requires 3.695 x 10^6 new SSNs annually. The total amount SSNs in the current scheme is (10^9) - 1. I'm going to be leaving out the -1. 10^9 total SSNs - 510.3x^6 spent SSNs leaves 489.7 x 10^6 SSNs available. 489.7/3.695 is 132.5.
So in conclusion, assuming a constant population, the US can go for another 132.5 years with the present scheme without having to reuse any SSN.
SSN’s are also given out to immigrants as well though, so that’s a whole other population of people outside of just natural born citizens to account for. The US awards around one million green cards annually, though I don’t know what the historical numbers are.
Oh snap! Thanks for bringing that up. Adding another million each year, and assuming a constant green card rate since before WW2(!), adds another 88 million spent SSNs. With an additional million green cards annually, that makes the calculation (1000-510.3-88)x10^6 SSNs /4.695 x 10^6 SSNs/year = 85.6 years.
So the US has until about the end of the century to figure it out.
Plenty of time to put off thinking about it until the last possible minute.
An American tradition
Meh, why do today what you can put off until it's someone else's problem?
It's not even like you leave for future you, that guy hates you already^1 you leave it for someone entirely unknown. They won't even know who to blame.
^1 Shayne Smith banned from karate reference.
Bummer, superscript doesn't work in any client, does it work for anybody else? Come to think about it, how stupid am I, I've used ^ extensively in this fucking thread smh
How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62? Great work on the calculation but all I’m saying is, if the government ran out of numbers and recycled them already, nobody would know about it. The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me and there’s no database of SSNs you can compare it to. Weirdly enough, official government departments straight up lie about things and easily get away with it heh.
That's why I extrapolated from the 1962-2018 numbers and came to a total number of 174.4 x 10^6 deaths.
Oh I agree. But it's a classic issue with old databases. We had a similar issue awhile back with license plates in Denmark. The plates had been assigned inefficiently by incrementing parts annually. So we had unused ranges as well as disused plates. But somehow nobody had made a list of these plates.