"Cubans qualify immediately for food stamps and Medicaid. If they are over 65 with little or no income, they also can collect a monthly check of up to $733 in Supplemental Security Income (SSI)."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Patriots, please bear in mind that the unconstitutional federal spending indicated in this thread is a consequence of the 17th Amendment (17A) imo. More about 17A shortly.
As a side note to this discussion about Social Security and other federal social spending programs, please consider the following info from a related thread which provides evidence that such programs are unconstitutional.
Although I question the motives of FDR era justices, these justices had evidently made the same mistake in interpreting the Constitution’s General Welfare Clause (GWC; 1.8.1) in deciding the constitutionality of Social Security (Helvering v. Davis) that the 14th Congress had made in trying to use the GWC to justify its federal public works bill.
More specifically, President James Madison, Madison generally regarded as the father of the Constitution, had vetoed Congress’s bill to build roads and canals which Congress had used its “specific power” of the GWC to justify. But as Madison had put it, the problem with Congress using the GWC to justify building roads and canals is that the GWC was not intended to be interpreted as a delegation of specific power to Congress.
”To refer the power in question to the clause "to provide for common defense and general welfare" would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms "common defense and general welfare" embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust.” —President James Madison, Veto of federal public works bill, March 3, 1817.
So based on Madison’s words, the GWC is nothing more than an introductory clause for the clauses which follow it in Section 8 which do enumerate specific powers.
Also note that both the FDR era 74th Congress that passed the bill that established Social Security without the required constitutional justification, and the 111th Congress which likewise passed Obamacare without the necessary constitutional justification, had also wrongly ignored the Constitution’s Article V requirement to successfully propose appropriate amendments to Constitution to the states before establishing such spending programs. If the states had chosen to ratify such amendments then Congress would have the constitutional authority that it needs to establish these programs.
Finally, consider that the question of the constitutionality of the bills that established Social Security and Obamacare should never have made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The reason is that they were ultimately tested by the Supremes is because the post-17th Amendment ratification Senate didn’t do its job to protect the states as the Founding States had intended for it to do.
More specifically, the corrupt Senate failed to kill the vote-winning but unconstitutional appropriations bills that established these programs since they not only steal unique, 10th Amendment-protected state powers to establish such programs, but they also steal state revenues associated with such powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
The ill-conceived 17th Amendment needs to disappear, and corrupt senators and activist justices that are confirmed by the Senate, justices who then wrongly declare that the unconstitutional spending bills that the Senate has passed are constitutional, along with it.
As an aside I was a welfare eligibility worker in my former life in the ‘70s and we processed many real refugees from Castro’s Cuba. But that was then and this is now.