>Isn't democracy lovely? This is also on of the problems the Swiss are struggling with: Democracy is like two wolves and a goat deciding what to eat for dinner (Hint.... it is not grass and hay).

Discussions like this are a scapegoat (pun intended).

Most of the waste is not in what Joe Q swindles out of the system, he's too small. And even so, Joe Q didn't vote for any of the particular laws whereby he'd get a chance at the common teat. He voted for one of the parties, based on their advertising, paid by... guess who.

The same payers own the media and make sure that every discussion of this kind is about Joe Q Sixpack and not about them. So we discuss Medicare, Medicaid, entitlements and whatnot, but don't discuss the (how many?) bailouts, large scale skimming on the top, system which enables, no, entitles any Walstreet paper pusher to get rich by shoving a prospering business into ruin, allows insurances to evade their obligations (remember New Orleans?), endless invention of more government agencies, funding long defunct programs, paying owners of huge swaths of land to produce nothing on it etc etc. These entitlements remain safely out of the picture.

The misuse of the food stamps must be stamped out. Let's add another wee bit of tax to create an agency to more tightly control the issue.