So yeah, a psycho-stalker who’s been blogging shit about me thinks I’m trying to scam the government simply for receiving unemployment benefits.
The problem with this line of “reasoning”, of course, is that it misses a central point: I PAID FOR MY UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS.
Okay, for those who still can’t quite grasp the concept, here’s a little lesson in how the social insurance system functions.
You go to work, and you pay taxes on your income. But, unless you’re very wealthy and pull in over the wage cap, you also pay what are known as payroll taxes. These are taxes your employer ostensibly pays for things like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Welfare, and Unemployment Benefits. But your employer takes the money to cover these expenses directly out of your paycheck, so it’s really you paying the payroll tax. The rules for being able to collect benefits vary from state to state, but this is the basic explanation of how these insurance programs are paid for.
Let’s say you’ve worked for a while and now you’re unemployed, but you’ve met the requirements in your state for collecting those benefits you paid for. So you apply and are approved. You still need to actively seek work, but while you do this, you’re able to pay your bills like rent, utilities, and for groceries, transportation, and so on. It’s your money. You essentially set it aside through your taxes to guard against the possibility that you might someday need it.
That’s the essence of insurance. Millions of people worldwide pay for insurance, which promises certain benefits. That’s how it is supposed to work.
So where in all this does it become an “entitlement” program for “lazy” people? I worked for my unemployment benefits and I paid for them. If “entitlement” means that I expect to use something I paid for, then yes, in the strictest definitional sense, Unemployment Benefits are an “entitlement”. But those who claim, falsely, that it’s some kind of charity for lazy people are deliberately lying. There’s no charity involved. It’s a service and I worked for it and paid into it. Why is this so difficult to understand?
But in the deranged imagination of a diseased maniac, simply using the service I worked and paid for is somehow an indication of infantilism on my part. This is what irritates me about the far right and those it deceives: the notion that people can pay into an insurance policy against the insecurities of old age, unemployment, sickness and injury…it’s an affront to their warped sensibilities.
Why is this? It’s simple, really. Large corporations are obsessed with profit. Their CEOs, executives, and other officers see government as a competitor for profits, and despise government for not having a profit motivation. These degenerates think they are the only ones who should be able to get money from people, to use for their own pleasure, and to hell with the consumers. But governments are built ostensibly to provide services, not rake in profits, and so have an obligation to safeguard the public from predation by business interests. So the wealthy business folk hate government because they see it as taking money they consider theirs by birthright.
THAT is the real, unearned sense of entitlement to other people’s money. It’s not held by people like me who paid into an insurance policy and collect the promised services when needed. It’s held by greedy businesspeople. And because businesspeople control the mainstream media, they get to spread their rhetoric unchallenged by major competitors, and so get to spread their warped ideas to consumers, enough of whom who gobble it up that the strategy tends to work more often than not.
Naturally, my psycho-stalker runs with this because it dovetails nicely with his hatred for me. Anything and everything I say, do, and write is presented as “proof” of wrongdoing on my part, as though my working and collecting on the services I pay for is somehow a sin. It’s not, never was, and never will be.
If this were limited to my situation alone, that would be bad enough. But a sizable portion of the country has been duped over the decades since the New Deal began in 1933 into believing this bullshit, and it’s contributing to the decline and eventual collapse of America, and that bugs the hell out of me.