To the Editor:
Entitlement, my butt! I paid cash for my Social Security insurance! Just because they borrowed the money doesn’t make my benefits some kind of charity or handout. Congressional benefits, free healthcare, outstanding retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks’ paid vacations, unlimited paid sick days – now that’s welfare. They have the nerve to call my Social Security benefits “entitlements.”
We’re broke and can’t help our own seniors, veterans, orphans or homeless. In the last years we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, Turkey, and now Pakistan (home of Osama Bin Laden). Literally billions of dollars in aid have been given. Our retired seniors live on a fixed income and they receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations pour hundreds of billions of dollars and tons of food into foreign countries.
They call Social Security an “entitlement” even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives, and now when it’s time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Why did the government borrow from it in the first place? Imagine if the government gave us the same support they give to other countries. We wouldn’t be as sad, would we? We seniors have to sit back and wait until the government tells us what we are entitled to.
This is what we get from our own country for being citizens.
VIRGINIA PITARESI