My brother is a disability recipient, and he has a house and nice TV. However, SSD is not a needs based system, he would be disabled regardless of how much money he has. The money he gets every year from SS does not go far, little is left over after property taxes and insurance.cb1000rider wrote:I'm not sure that diving through the Rio Grande Valley counts as objective data collection on welfare recipients and ownership of large TVs. If you've got some data, show me... I'm convinced by data and I'm likely to change my opinion.VMI77 wrote: A non-responsive answer even if true, which it isn't. You should try living in the Rio Grande Valley and keeping your eyes open --you'll see a quite different picture than the Democratic party line you're spouting here.
I'm critical of just looking at welfare. I think that's a mistake to rail against that when we've got bigger issues. All of the disability recipients that I know have nice TVs and certainly the income and lifestyle provided are much higher.
I went to the Social Security office in Fort Worth after my mom died so I could be set up as his representative payee and boy did it open my eyes. There are people who do this professionally, and they absolutely control that money and the people receiving it. After talking to the case worker for a few minutes and told her our situation, she was so happy to see the system working as it was supposed to without someone gaming the system she had me approved while still waiting on a copy of his birth certificate (for some reason, they had his DOB wrong, for the last 45 years).
If the whole program died tomorrow it wouldn't be that big of a deal for me, he has some money stashed away and I can call him a dependent and claim him on my taxes. It would be missed, but not the end of the world and all the professional gamers would have to find a new line of scam.