theluckycountry wrote:So the rich get all the wealth?
Social Security costs, $1.151 trillion
Medicare ($722 billion)
Medicaid ($448 billion)
Food stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition, Child Tax Credits, Supplemental Security Income, Student Loans, Retirement and disability programs for civil servants, the Coast Guard, and the military. ($645 billion)
Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, government pensions to a point are all paid for by the recipients. Whether they are appropriately funded is another story. The US military, including pensions is a bloated boondoggle, I know because my SIL a first Sergeant, tells me so.
Food stamps expect a family to spend 30% of income on food, 2/3 are old, kids or disabled of the rest most ARE employed, making pissant wages. They get $130 a month on average. Many work for Walmart and Mcdonalds,
The rich don't come from Mars. They are often average people who have risen out of the muck and now enjoy the benefits of their superior intelligence, or luck, or dogged hard work. This is the whole ethos of America is it not?
Back when America was great there was class mobility.
No more.
Much has to do with AI that picks job applicants and automatically rejects those without a degree even when none is required. Obviously we all know how hard parent's work, cheat, bribe to get their kids in good schools. School loans are the fastest growing credit bubble—college is such a huge scam that trump even tried to get a piece.
All this churn is because there is just too many people trying for too few jobs, and it is gonna get worse. And guess who is going to suffer the most? Yep, uneducated rural people, the Ds with degrees in the cities are doing just fine. It is the folks in the hinterlands that vote for the billionaires who turn around and eat their lunch.
Crap, no wonder they are offing themselves
Music to off yourself by.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)