[quote=CONCHO]The government will get out of the housing business when it gets out of the medical business, the war business, the energy business, the education business, the food business, the air travel business, and too many more for me to remember.[/quote]
It doesn’t bother me so much that they’re in these things (some things are just facts of life), but it gets my knickers in a twist when opportunistic politicians allow for unlimited expansion of expensive programs. For example, there are far more people applying for disability benefits under Social Security/Medicare, than there are retirement benefits. And quite a few of those are pre-school kids!
The fallout from this limitless growth is that we’ve become a society in which motivation to take care of ourselves and our own is becoming a scarce commodity. There are quite a few large studies that have been following cohorts of seniors and pre-seniors for several years. They show that the younger (“boomer”) generation cohort (in their 50s) in the study is reporting much higher rates of disability than did the older cohort (in their 80s) for the same conditions.
What really twists my knickers to the seam-busting point is when I meet up with, or read about, “conservative” citizens complaining bitterly about government intervention in their lives, but who are receiving SSI, food stamps, Medicaid/Medicare (and usually bitching because the payments are too low). I’ve been seriously ill in my life, but continued to work and was fortunate enough to have employer-assisted health care coverage. But if I should become disabled in the future, why is it the government’s job to take care of me? I may have to sit on the street in my wheelchair pan-handling, or I may die from lack of health care, but that’s what life was until the mid-20th century.
That being said, I believe that we are morally compelled to take care of our truly needy fellow citizens, and am willing to pay extra taxes to do so. But I stress “truly needy”, and I will do my utmost to stay out of that category for as long as I can. And as a fortunate citizen of this great nation, I will comply with whatever policy is adopted by the citizenry via their votes for government officials, whether or not it agrees with my personal mores and ethics.
I really wish the hypocrisy and the double-standards would stop, and that those screaming about excessive government intervention would revise their personal expectations of that intervention, and start taking care of themselves and their families.
