text: Trad, all our actual welfare programs are very specific for the "worthy poor"--that's the hallmark of non-charity, which ruins your perspective on that issue. 
  
  
  You are combining all entitlement programs, including Medicare, into your numbers, which is certainly a very common and unsophisticated approach, used to make the wrong points. If you don't think older, retired persons should have medical coverage in our 'non-system' of health insurance, which was built around employees offering medical coverage to workers, then I guess you are dating yourself back to before the Great Depression. The nation is not going to follow you there. 
  
  
  As to your very strange belief that having to pay taxes to your own government is "theft" from a moral basis, you don't have the Church's support on that idea of morality. You are on your own.