The Arrogant Washington Insider Community Have No Idea How Critical SS and Medicare Are

I cringe with anger whenever I see highly paid, well-off "journalists" on Sunday morning talk shows interview well-off, highly paid Washington insiders and bemoan Social Security and Medicare as unsustainable entitlement programs. To these people SS and Medicare are just abstract concepts, line items on a spread sheet somewhere. Something that they won't ever need because their assets are fat. Their pensions are paid. Their home values are increasing, and there's always employment some where, whether in government, a think tank, or a lobbying firm.

For everyone else in America, SS and Medicare are economic life lines. In a lot of instances, they allow middle class families to provide care and comfort for their elderly parents while taking care of their children. These programs are literally life and death for millions of Americans. They are not abstract concepts that can be "fixed" with a clever phrase like "empowering the elderly" with vouchers.

The beltway media is far too enamored with wealth and power to see anything objectively.

Certain people take care of certain other people at the expense of others. That's the effect that corrupt campaign finance & corrupt voting systems have had upon our culture.

occurred to me why they are championing the end of entitlements, in essence it amounts to a tax break for them. The wealthy pay into medicare (1.45% amount will continue to be withheld on all earnings) & Social Security (capped at $106,800.00) up to the limits, the rest of their income is exempt from this. End the entitlements and that portion of their income becomes exempt. Food for thought.

I think it's a function of their belief that they will never be dependent on social security or medicare. The gravy train has come through, they got theirs, and it doesn't matter what the proles need or want, they should have chosen to be highly-paid stenographers and court jesters for the powers that be.

About a year ago a friend and I were riding motorcycles around this state, seeing every country and camping along the way. We had got going one morning and stopped in our first destination town to find somewhere to get breakfast. We parked the bikes (laden with camping gear) at a diner and pretty quickly got into a conversation with a local fellow. He was the Reporter (and several other things) for the local weekly newspaper. He was interested in us, and we were very much interested in what he could tell us about the county and the region. It was a very pleasant conversation, and somewhere along the line I asked the fellow what the major source of income was for the county we were in. Oh, I should have mentioned, we were down in West Virginia's "southern coal fields", though at the moment I don't recall what county we were in, maybe McDowell, or Boon, one of them down that way. At any rate here is the answer the guy gave me "Social Security". He told us that Social Security was by far the number 1 source of household income country-wide, and that in fact there was nothing else. Other than some mom and pop retail places that had a couple of no-income employees, and maybe a couple of well drillers, there was nothing else.

There was also a county down there in which, after driving across the entire country I never saw a single home that appeared to be lived in and was a permanent structure. Every occupied home I saw was a mobile home.