Your ignorance SHOULDE make you humble.  That would lead you to try to reduce   
   your ignorance.  But your ignorance leads you to a perverse sense of arrogance   
   which makes your comments really funny but also sort of sad.   
      
   >>>> It is the right that came up with the term "entitlements" just to promote   
   >>>> the idea that the people receiving services have not and will never   
   >>>> contribute anything.   
   > ...   
      
   >> His partisan bias leads him to make stuff up.  Social   
   >> security was sold to Congress and the public as an earned   
   >> entitlement, as a way of saying that it was not just a   
   >> charity but a system of payments that the recipients were   
   >> entitled to.   
      
   > Do you have anything at all to back that up? Contemporary news reports?   
   > Transcripts of congressional debates?   
      
   Are you really THAT ignorant?  That was the whole phil;osophy behind the   
   program.  That was why it was supposed to be paid for by an earmarked payroll   
   tax rather than out of general revenue as a welfare program would.   
      
   In the words of Roosevelt: "those taxes were never a problem of economics.    
   They are politics all the way through.  We put those payroll contributions   
   there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to   
   collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits.  With those taxes in   
   there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."   
      
   Unlike you, apparently, I have indeed read the debates over Social Security,   
   as well as the reflections of Myers and others.  I don't have them handy, but   
   the basic idea should be easy for you to find.  It was at the core of   
   Roosevelt's proposal of the program.  Sylvester Schieber's book, The   
   Predictable Surprise, is one of the better books on the subject: "FDR, who   
   understood public sentiments on many matters as well as anyone, felt strongly   
   that the system should be 'contributory' because it would give participants a   
   sense of ownership and create a sense of 'rights' or 'entitlement' that would   
   not dismissed lightly."  The same point was made by John Corson when he looked   
   back on the first decade of the program in his 1942 article in Social Service   
   Review: "The contributions, like the premiums paid under a private  insurance   
   contract, create a feeling of personal entitlement which  tends to preserve   
   the self-respect of the beneficiary and his survivors"   
      
   Those are the basic facts.  A person in possession of the facts would never   
   have made the profoundly stupid claims that you have made.  Most people who   
   were not initially in possession of the facts would have been hunmble enough   
   to seek out the facts.  Only a profoundly arrogant ignorant person would make   
   something up and proclaim that it is true solely because they WANT it to be   
   true.   
      
      
   --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-1   
    * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)