Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Oleg Ulogov asks Why doesn’t the USA have a standard national ID? Is the fact that your identity is not documented consistently anywhere a source of all kinds of problems? If two people with the same name are born on the same day or die on the same day, how do you know who is who?

This is an easy one to answer. The first is that the United States is a union of states. Each state has its own sovereignty to handle its own affairs, such as driver’s licenses.

Second, everyone in the US has a unique identifier in the form of a Social Security number. Also, passports are federal documents that are universally accepted as identification.