What a sad state we are in.  

Marsha

Social Security retiree payments are not government benefits or federal largesse or anything else of the sort. Rather, they constitute partial reimbursement for decades of confiscation of an individual's earnings. Please be more judicious in your choice of words.

I for one have never accepted a dime of welfare money or anything else resembling a payment whose source is the unwillingly commandeered wealth of other Americans; God willing, I never shall. Neither I nor anyone else receiving "retiree" Social Security ought to be lumped in with those who live off tax revenue extorted from the remaining Americans who haven't been put out of work by Obama's administration and those preceding it for half a century. Those traitorous servants of America's hostile elite have succeeded in their historic aim of displacing native-born Americans from possession of the country that their forbears built and of handing it over to the wretched refuse of every un-Christian and anti-Christian shore on the planet—and making us pay the bill for our own displacement in the process.

Social Security retiree payments are not government benefits or federal largesse or anything else of the sort. Rather, they constitute partial reimbursement for decades of confiscation of an individual's earnings. Please be more judicious in your choice of words.

I think he was just quoting the survey, not expressing a personal opinion.  I think everyone BUT the gov't knows that SS is just the returning of a portion of the money that was taken from employees w/o their consent.  As to vet benefits they have been EARNED and are not welfare in any sense of the word.  Medicare?  I'm not sure about that one, and unemployment I have qualms about - at least for the extended length that it can go, I read somewhere that in some states you can get it for 99 weeks!  I don't know if it varies by state but here in AZ unemployment is a pittance, it probably would not even cover a months rent, which is surprising high here considering that housing prices are depressed.

This mess is what happens when government get in the "charity" business, it traps people in a cycle of poverty, keeping them on the plantation.

Marsha

Very well said, Claudel!

Thank you, Cantarella.

May I add that I am a veteran, and as such I denounce and condemn the overwhelming bulk of payouts to veterans. People here at CI need to stop thinking of servants of the US war machine as heroes and defenders of our shores. They are nothing of the sort. They constitute the sharp spearhead of the perpetual, Tribally directed US aggression against other peoples' shores and those who defend those shores.

There is a modicuм of practical sense (of moral sense less so) in favor of the argument that those who have been permanently disabled or who require either limited or lifelong care as a result of injuries sustained in killing foreigners and wrecking their economies should have their health care and other basic needs funded by the same overburdened taxpayers who paid for the vets' overcompensated active duty "service." But the kind of enlistment-to-grave welfare program, invariably extended to spouse and dependent offspring, that is now used as an enticement to get those with highly developed layabout inclinations to sign on the dotted line makes such people little else than permanent welfare kings and queens in uniform.

Even in the Vietnam War, a sizable number of those seeking medical care while on active duty in Vietnam did so to get treatment for venereal disease. In the course of my own time in Vietnam, I learned of one guy who got an unusual, highly resistant strain of gonorrhea that led to extended hospitalization followed by … wait for it … honorable discharge and the awarding of a status of total disability (even though he was nothing of the sort), which conferred a lifetime's worth of free medical care, permanent access to government-supplied housing, and a check in the mail (indexed to inflation!) every month. Some hero!

I know, too, that far too many of my fellow Vietnam vets—voluntary enlistees, mind you, not just draftees like me; but like me, fortunately, unscathed returnees to civilian life—have applied for and received the status of partial disability, with its accompanying payouts, despite having no observable disabilities whatsoever. They are assisted in applying for these benefits by various veterans' organizations, some of which are actual government agencies and others of which are NGOs largely or partly funded by taxpayer cash.

Land of the free and home of the brave? What land is that, please?

I know that my marked distaste for the military and its adventurism and for payouts to veterans is not widely shared, but Trads especially need to take off their blinders anent what government and media talking heads absurdly and dishonestly refer to as US interests overseas. (If these liars were truly interested in the safety and welfare of ordinary Americans, they wouldn't continue to import millions of foreigners to commit crimes and take our country away from us.) In plain terms this amounts to one thing only: the sick belief of a collection of immoral monsters and their camp followers that the use of deadly force to make them rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of the world is always and everywhere justified for no reason other than it's what makes them feel good. The only real difference between US aggression and Arab, Mongol, Hittite, Egyptian, Khazar, Chinese, Russian, British, and Maori aggression is that US armaments can kill more people faster and cheaper than was ever before imaginable—and with the glamour of a foreign-born president who's a member of a vibrant minority group to boot! Whoopee!
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I understand Marielar's concerns about unemployment compensation, especially its present-day Obamanoid variety, which is a reward extended mainly to minorities and illegal aliens who can demonstrate that they once worked, even if only a day or two ten years ago, and had taxes and SS "insurance" assessments withheld from their one and only paycheck. Such federalized unemployment compensation is now a total scam. But as originally conceived and as executed through at least the eighties and early nineties, all unemployment compensation programs (except the ludicrous overcompensation to largely worthless federal employees) were administered state by state. In at least some cases they were 100 percent funded by employee withholding assessments and mandated employer contributions (by and large the biggest part of the funding). Thus, for a strictly limited period of time, they frequently assisted only those who were (1) willing and able to work and (2) out of work through no fault of their own, and most important, the funding came from the workers themselves and private employers.

In these cases, though unemployment insurance was certainly, like social security, misguided as well as being waste-, fraud-, and abuse-infested, it wasn't truly a giveaway program to benefit the undeserving and unworthy.

Somehow my post from yesterday may have got deleted.

This is the way the ruling elites likes it.  More people on the
welfare rolls, more votes for them to keep themselves in
perpetual power.  Bringing in legal and illegal immigrants
to do jobs at slave wages.  Get several generations use to
living off the government and have no desire to work.
Just march down to the voting precinct with the rest of their
comrades and vote democrat, democrat all the way.
Nothing to do all day unless you are a welfare single mom.
End up in a life of crime and gangs.  Getting arrested and
work for the privately owned prison system enriching the
judicial system and lawyers too.
It does not have to be this way.  This is the way the
ruling elites want society to be, meanwhile they escape
to their gated and guarded communities.