SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
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