Darwoth wrote:social security, medicare and medicaid are handouts that need to be eliminated, the country does not have the ability to pay everyones lunch indefinitely without imploding.
I won't discuss medicaid because it is an entitlement program. Everyone is entitled to their opinions on these things on whether their good or bad, and there's tons of "research" pointing both ways on them. It comes down to what you trust and your morals.
Medicare and Social Security, on the other hand, are supposed to be a separate tax off your paycheck (FICA and forget the other category). This is the complete opposite of an entitlement. (There is the clause in the SSA that allows for a minimum living expense for the disabled, which makes up a severe minority of those collecting benefits, or at least was the intention.) The Federal government was supposed to keep their hands out of this cookie jar so that when people came of retirement age, there was a nice buffer of monies paid in by the employees (and matching funds by employers) to cover any expenses here as well as the payouts. However, due to the baby boom after WWII, there was an excess of funds in the coffers (some would say severe excess at the time) and the Feds started dipping into this "borrowing" money against the future to cover budget overruns. It's just gotten worse. Now, baby boomers are retiring and the funds are expected to dry up because the size of the workforce is undergoing the expected shrinkage.
Now, I will express my opinion on some of the disabled benefits. I have a cousin that has some very severe mental health issues. He's violent and considered unemployable. While he is considered treatable, it's only to the point that he doesn't have to be housed in a facility and can care for himself. I don't think he's had a job more than 3 months ever. The alternative would be that he continues trying to work until one day he goes off on the wrong person and ends up in prison. This would likely be an endless cycle until at some point the cost of imprisonment would be higher than the benefits he's likely to collect over a lifetime. The cost of even the lowest security inmate is nearly twice per year as what social security, medicaid, and welfare (food stamps) pay out to the disabled. A maximum security inmate (what most violent inmates get put in) is about double the cost of supervision and housing as a minimum security inmate.
We won't even discuss people that actually got injured on the job and can't work. (Can't, not won't retrain and find different work.) If a person thinks that these people don't deserve the pittance of assistance they get from the state (because workman's comp is complete **** in many cases), they should really be put in the other person's shoes for just a year and shipped off to a country without any of these benefits.
I'm probably shooting myself in the foot with this one, but... as far as the "Welfare Mom" goes... I can think of a lot of solutions to help with this, but the various states and federal government refuse to look at them because they're too expensive in the short term or considered oppressive to those that are already disenfranchised. Paid abortions would be one option (good luck getting that past the Moral Majority, though). Birth control solutions that don't require daily or weekly monitoring (pills, condoms) is another.
maggie wrote: we watched the person in front of us using a welfare credit card buy all kinds of unnecessary items like chips and cookies
This has been a huge debate the last decade or two. It's also considered as one of the causes of obesity in the US. If you're that desperate for chips and cookies, you can make them yourself in under 30 minutes each, and nobody is going to know that's what your buying potatoes and salt or flour, sugar and butter for.
Greb wrote:Russia Now Declares USA White House Set up 9/11 Bombings
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2af_1378742526
I just have to know, how reliable is this website?
