Those damned Social Security recipients. They're a blight on our society, a drain on our precious tax dollars, and should certainly consider workhouses and/or decreasing the surplus population (cf. Scrooge) rather than continuing to depend on a program that can only continue to function a few decades from now if we, say, stop capping the maximum amount that the wealthy are required to contribute each year to SSI.
I mean, if they were real American, they'd have jobs. Or family to take care of them. Or local churches to give them canned goods once a week. Or something. Just don't keep spending my hard-earned tax dollars on them. Damned Takers.
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Can you explain this. If your country has say 200 million people of working age and only 100 million jobs, does it then only have 100 million people?
Disabled people have a right to exist and a right to exist comfortably. There is no good reason why their upkeep should be entirely dependant on generous family members. Ware it and whine less!
I am what you call a "damned recipient" of Social Security and a blight on society. I worked for 18 years before i began receiving social security. i returned to university and obtained two degrees before I became disabled. I went to work at an oil and gas company where i was sexually harassed and had a nervous breakdown. i sued the supervisor and company, to no avail as i had photos, evidence to prove my case but due to apparent corruption lost the lawsuits. Now i am totally reliant on social security through no fault of my own. I cannot work now because i have PTSD and Depression among other illnesses. If it weren't for social security, i'd be on the streets again. So walk in my shoes and see if i should call you blight on society!! The company i sued owes me more than $500,000 in back pay plus punitive damages. Family can't help and charities don't have enough to support me. I am in mid-50s now and my future is bleak. Please consider people like myself before you lump us all together as just "damned takers" of social security! +Dave Hill P.S. I am a female and an Hispanic. Not only were the men sexist, they were also racist!
Let me tell you the story of my household of "takers."
My mom is on SSI. My dad mostly paid for it I figure — she's a widow. She worked too part time a lot of of her life but mostly I figure he was the breadwinner — what a lot of people think of as a typical family of that "greatest generation." He died eleven years ago last month. She has Parkinson's and Lewy Body dementia — the dementia is actually worse than the Parkinson's itself, and is her primary diagnosis. On top of that, she's got hypertension, a history of strokes, a dozen other things — a pill tray that looks like a smorgasbord every day. She's also bright and shy. Really not the kind of person who'd do well in a nursing home — and I know because my brother, bless his pointy little aspie-ish head, had her in one for a while.
So I took her into my home for the last six years. But my health sucks too. So it's hard, but maybe it would be harder for me to work full time — this is the traditional use for old maid frail women — to care for their mothers. Mass Health (aka RomneyCare) pays me a non-taxable stipend to care for her and another gentleman who boards with us who had hydrocephalus as a kid and in middle age can't manage himself independently. For keeping the two of them out of skilled nursing care — many thousands of dollars in tax expenses a month — Massachusetts pays me $2000 a month. For both of them.
And they give me a bit of cash toward rent and expenses, and in the gentleman's case, some food stamps.
By doing that we save some rich idiots who think we are takers thousands of dollars every month. And by not paying into the SSI system, I am actually endangering my own retirement pay out (assuming the system is still there when I retire) by taking a non-taxable stipend from the state to care for my own mom.
Did I mention we're living pretty much impoverished? But it's actually not so bad. There's a lot of love in the house. We cook from scratch. We get cable and live in a community where the two of us who are ambulatory can walk most anywhere. We do have friends and they help us out with things sometimes, or take us to dinner or whatever as a treat.
By the way, it seems to me that taking favors from others is also "taking" — in this society there is nothing more socially isolating than not being able to go to dinner or coffee or a movie with friends, since those things that we spend money on are the center of our social lives. Even at church people look at you funny according to where you live and what you do with your spare time according to income.
I used to be an engineer before a stroke-like acquired brain injury knocked out my math center — so much for 30 years of software engineering — so this is pretty much a stark contrast for me. If someone could put Mr Romney in a The Prince and the Pauper situation for a few months, he might change his tune rather rapidly. Happily I grew up as a rural minister's kid, with parents who grew up as immigrant's kids in the great depression. I know how to live well on very little.
But the attitude that the poor are lazy or deserving is truly despicable. I spent all my retirement savings in a health crisis, supporting a family of four through a single mother breadwinner being knocked out while I was sick and before we realized I was not getting better; launching my son into college, and taking in my mom.
Perhaps some of these Ayn Rand types would say I should have ditched some of these obligations. I'd simply say, whatever love they have in their lives, I'm not sure how they earned it but maybe it's bought.
I've been collecting for a few years now and I am still paying SS taxes. Nobody seems to acknowlege many of us are still paying into SS. Not to mention Congress takes how much from SS to spend general buget .
And you think people on SSI are happy being on it? people can barely get by on it, even more so if they are collecting several hundred dollars below the average monthly SSI. You best rethink what you spew out of that mouth of yours, its hate speech on disabled people.
For those who don't know Dave, he was being sarcastic, mocking the people who want to eliminate programs such as Social Security.
I love how calm and deliberate all the posts have been on this. Especially if people might have thought +Dave Hill was being serious.
Good lord, I knew he was serious. He was seriously mocking the idiots like Romney. Just look at the character of all of his posts — that's why I started following him. 😉
There you go again, Dave. Stirring up shit. I thought that was my job. 😉
Yikes. I knew I should have included the "[sarcasm] [/sarcasm]" flags. I guess that was a living example of how the Poe Effect can apply to political discussions, too.
So, yes, I was absolutely joshing with the above, poking fun at people who actually say those sorts of things (I would have hoped the reference to Scrooge would have given that way). Sorry for any confusion.
Looks like someone forgot to use their sarcastic font again.
I'm retired, but not on SS. My neighbor is on SSI and dude can barely afford to eat every month and having to choose between getting all his medicines he needs and feeding himself. Nearly killed me when he knocked on my door one day asking me for food 🙁
SSI is barely enough as it is to keep body and soul together. And yet people forget what things were like before it, when the end of a working life, or the death of a parent or spouse meant a decent into abject poverty for far too many people. That's why it was instituted in the first place.
SSI, because it beats the crap out of rolling riots and dead people in the streets.
My mom is a widow with dementia. My dad was a minister — they just don't make enough to set aside huge amounts of retirement money, and these days they don't stay in one place a whole career so that a community would take care of her at the end of her life.
She had three kids. One is in Colorado, one is in Washington state — my two brothers. Both are in their middle/late 60s, and she is in her early 90s. Both think SSI should be enough (she's long since run out what little my dad had in retirement with her health issues) and that we should "just put her in a home."
They both think I'm nuts to be taking care of her at home with me. This is the down side of federal programs. People have forgotten the compassionate side of taking care of elders.
Listen, if you had a kid with mental health issues, would you stick them in a "home" so casually? This is a cultural issue. I was applying for health benefits with a nurse at a community hospital here. She was latina. She saw my unusual surname and asked what my nationality was — and when I told her she said, "ah, well, that explains it — you know, white people [by which she meant Europeans] just put their old people away, like old boxes."
My mom dealt with me when I was in diapers, when I was a kid, and when I was an obnoxious teenager for many years. I was a burden in terms of gray hair and expenses. But now my brothers won't send a dime to supplement what the government trickles to keep her together (and with all her issues it doesn't go far) because "that's what we pay taxes for." If I don't like the way we're living I should send her to an institution.
I find this sucks as an attitude. In this, the Republicans have a point about the family values thang, and I am behind them. The baby went out with the bathwater.
You don't stop being family, human, or worthy at 62, 65, 70, or when you stop being healthy.
And you should start remembering that now, before you become a soylent green candidate yourself.
I won't second guess, in a vacuum, the decision of when a family member needs professional care and housing. I'm sure there are people who are too quick to go for that option (assuming they have the resources). I'm pretty sure there are also others who should seek more professional help for their failing loved ones but who refuse to do so for a variety fo reasons.
I do agree, +Shava Nerad, that families need to try and stick together and support one another. Ditto communities. Federal assistance is not a replacement for that (and certainly is not f=sufficient as same). But it's not an either-or choice, either.
Also? Not everyone has family/church to fall back on. The same people beating the "family values" drum seem to be the ones who won't let gay people marry. Or if someone lives an "unworthy" life in some way, family will not be disposed to help them at all. And some people don't have children.
…and some people's family are not worthy, hate to say it.
Having worked in international human rights and privacy work with the Tor Project, I got to work with a lot of groups of abuse and incest survivors who used Tor to participate in online support groups anonymously because they didn't want to deal with outing their families for whatever reasons — often because, presumably, they were still in contact with them on a frequent basis and a segment of their family were not aware of the abuse/incest perpetrated upon them.
If I were in that kind of situation, I might have a seriously hard time asking certain parts of my family for any kind of assistance. Subtexts can be overwhelming. This is a choice I am deeply grateful I never have to face personally — just contemplating it by proxy, so to speak, seemed very twisted.
I'm afraid I got to see way too many things-which-once-seen-can-not-be-unseen. People tend to assume more things surrounding Tor are on the darknet side of life, but I can tell you there are amazing and poignant stories of profound good coming out of that community that will never be told in a verifiable way.
So yes, setting up ways for the state to be the in loco parentis for those who do not have sane parents is a vital function. It's unfortunately one that is not invoked soon enough in too many cases; but that's a hard call too.
+Shava Nerad I've seen people use the Freenet Project as well for anonymous sessions among each other.