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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alexandermf who wrote (40324)	9/28/2000 11:06:48 AM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Good luck with your surgery.........and a speedy recovery.

To: Alexandermf who wrote (40324)	9/28/2000 11:11:26 AM
From: microhoogle!	Respond to of 769670

Alex, Good luck on the surgery and a speedy recovery to you. Surgeon will find that you have a "Big and Good Heart" <gg>

To: Alexandermf who wrote (40324)	9/29/2000 2:31:12 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Give me one good reason a young family, struggling to get by financially, should support wealthy elderly Americans worth millions with free prescription drugs? No one is against helping the elderly who are needy. It's the well off elderly who don't need free government services. In any population segment, I could run around and find examples of poor people struggling to get by. Should we just give EVERYONE free prescription drugs? Why not free homes to everyone, free cars, and free health care? Not means testing these programs is idiotic. It only leads our nation toward complete socialism, where our liberties are stripped from us one piece at a time. Additionally, how much more would elderly Americans be making today if we didn't have STUPID laws which punished them a few years ago for making over 9 grand a year! The liberal Democrats (who controlled congress for 40 years) punished the elderly for simply earning 9 thousand dollars a year. They stole a large portion of their social security check if they decided to work. Contrary to your jaded view. Many elderly Americans simply enjoy working. And they don't all work in Five-and-Dime stores because they desperately need the money. They like to be useful, meet people and be active. Sure, they also enjoy the extra income, but money isn't the primary reason many of them work. I had an Aunt about 10 years ago who loved to work in the local Hospital in Boston (She was 73). She wanted to work full time, but could only work a few days a week because of being punished for earning over 9 grand a year. Even then, she had to keep a close eye on her pay stubs for fear of earning over the limit allowed by social security. How utterly stupid of us as a society to punish people who want to be useful in their old age! I'll give you another example... My mother is 70, and likes to earn extra income for christmas presents and such. So she works as a transcriptionist in Florida and has one doctor. She's still a terrific typist and can pound out over 100 words a minute. Often, she tells me it's just not worth working anymore because with her and my stepfathers income (he's 75) they're punished severely with taxes for working. They think it's ridiculous the government should take from the young to give them free prescription drugs. Because they understand (contrary to many Democrats on this board) that nothing is free. Dishing out free drugs to everyone simply because they reach a certain age, is simplistic nonsensical socialism. As a society we need to be smarter than that, we need to look at the entire system of poverty and understand the overlapping issues which cause and affect its growth. The primary one being education. We need to empower the individual over the state, and allow them choice in order to challenge the system of management to provide the delivery of education we need as a society. Our government school system is failing the poor at an astounding rate. And all the Democrats can do is say..."throw more money at the problem", when we know money alone won't deal with it effectively. Further, we need to uncouple the singular relationship between social security - old age - and government. We can do this by empowering people to invest a portion (at first) of social security into private pension funds, kept in the individuals name. If we had been investing a portion of social security in pension funds for the past 50 years, we would undoubtedly have millions more elderly wealthy people today. Who didn't demand free prescription drugs. Reasonable solutions appear within our grasp as a nation. But we have this narrow-minded (primarily) Democratic populace unable to grasp how these issues are intertwined. The first thing they have to realize is no solution is going to be a panacea. But we can certainly learn as a nation from the lessons of free enterprise, and what it can can achieve. Government solutions, run by government, empowering government, are not the answer. We may not know the perfect right answer. But we can certainly recognize the wrong one when the evidence is so clear! Socialism leads to decay, stagnation and state control over our liberties. Finally, we have a special responsibility as a nation in the world. American must remain free as a guiding influence to the rest of the world of what a nation can achieve, when individual liberty remains one of its highest ideals. Michael