This more than anything is what is going to kill us. Gimme gimme gimme and make someone else pay for it. And when you don’t get what you want, riot. Ever since the 30s, more and more people think that someone else owes them a living. It started out with groups everyone agreed needed help — Social Security for the very old. Now anyone can get Welfare and Food Stamps. And programs for the elderly (Medicare especially) are bankrupting us. But if you try to reform them, there are riots. Government workers get premium benefits because they think they deserve it. And a big chunk of the population agrees. They think “the rich” have enough money to pay for everyone else to get a free ride. Hence the fact that the top 10% pay over half the taxes. We are in for a long, ugly period of American history. All because we moved from self-sufficiency to “make someone else pay” over the past 80 years.
I’m a federal employee who worked in private sector for 25 years. Premium benefits? Like what? The health insurance is so expensive we use my husbands, I pay a lot for the dental, vision and life insurance I do get...what else is there? I’m on the FERS retirement plan, and that’s nothing to write home about either.
We don’t get a Christmas ham, logo’ed mug, or even a pen with our agency name on it. You guys that buy into the lie of how great the fed employees have it are no different then the occutards crying about the 1 percenters.
I work as a lab tech for a fairly large hospital. I see a lot people able to work coming in on Gateway or Medical Assistance and they get whatever the doctor ordered paid for. Then you have the elderly come in on medicare and we have to go test by test to see if that test will be paid by medicare or will it be out of pocket by the patient. Its screwed up.
Families should take care of each other....that means kids should help out their parents in their later years, instead of the government doing it.
You’ve done a great job of describing what’s going on in Europe right now. The Eurotrashes are busy demonstrating the end of the “social democrat” state. Watch a little bit of Deutche Welle news every day——it’s like a slomo bungi jump with no rope. Put March 31 on your calendar and watch for the Gleeks to hit the creek first. They are the first to have a huge bond payment coming due and they don’t have the beans to cover it. It took over a year because they kept lying about how much debt they had. But they finally bid it up to 400 billion Euros and there is not enough hay in Europe to feed that fat cow. And that’s just the start of the eurozone troubles. The Greek economy is about the size of Chicago, give or take, and you have to add a lot of zeros to compare them to us——but the mess they have is the mess we’re making, and soon.
The city dwelling, institutionalized (college, union, government), criminal (drug, etc) population has reached critical mass. There are more bad guys than good guys.