[wind_magic]

Health care

One thing that strikes me about the new health care bill is that if you assume a conservative 200$us/month health care bill for the average poor person and add in 100$us/month in food stamps, that gets you to about 300k$us/month or 3.6k$us/year in benefits. For a working poor person to have a retirement income of 3.6k$us/year would mean that they need to save up 120k$us at a 3% interest rate, or approximately 10% of a 30k/year salary for about 20 years, assuming the rest goes towards the cost of working (vehicle, gasoline, etc).

That begs the question, if the government is going to give you free health care and 100$us/month in food stamps for doing absolutely nothing, and you are a poor person who only makes 30k$us/year, why bother working at all ? Assuming you have a roof over your head, you're no better off in retirement if you make 30k$us/year (without the new health care bill) than you would be if you just quit your job today and sit in the park and feed pigeons (with the new health care bill).

I'm all about people having affordable health care, but at some point it seems like you are creating incentives for people to sit on their butt doing nothing all day.