welfare recipients.
The most successful social program ever, giving independance to those retirees or elderly, or disabled, even though it continues to dribble down each year and provides fewer medical benefits, or at best, the minimum.
It signifies the end of a nation that cared about it's elderly enough to spare them becoming a burden on their children, which most that I know, view as anathema. Now it seems, those children would as soon throw them out,(I don't think they will consider taking them in--state nursing homes would be better?)because they bought what Republicans have been pushing for the past twenty or thirty years--under the guise of "less government" is better, and that is that their own retirement is in jeapardy because they are paying their money to pay for old people who have the nerve to live on their money.
It also signifies a country where the young have taken up arms against these elderly recipients, who have also contributed during their day, to the generation preceding them. This, in favor of more privatization and more money to the corporations putting more control over the life of an average citizen.
more information:
Robert Reich's take
http://bowman.typepad.com/cubowman/2004/11/robert_reich_on.htmland
http://bowman.typepad.com/cubowman/2004/11/noam_scheiber_o.htmland
"In this illustration, the Nazis demonstrated that the daily cost to the state of maintaining one chronically ill person (5.5 marks) could be better spent supporting an entire healthy German family."
Era: Before WWII