My grandmother used to tell me about how they used to buy penny insurance policies before SS. The name came from the fact that you paid a penny a week for each policy and they were for the equivalent to a years salary. Some of the ones she had were for $500.00 to give you an idea. She had 30 of them which she figured was a bit overkill but better to be safe. When she retired in the 1960's she cashed in her first policy and that $500 policy paid her I think it was $5000 (the average yearly salary). When Social security was started it basically put the penny policies out of business. The argument was that SS would pay more than $500 when you retired.

Though not a big fan of SS it did work as planned until the politicians rigged the system and started bloating the SSI ranks. The last figure I saw was that SSI is now 20% of Social securities payouts each month. A program that was intended to help people with catastrophic injuries is now paying people with temper issues. SS isn't breaking Social Security SSI is.

We were poor when I grew up and my brothers and I joined the Army in the 1960's so we could get GI Bill benefits and be able to afford college. The middle class kids all had Mom and Dad's to pay for their college and had no problem calling us baby killers etc.....Fast forward to today ...... My BF (also a veteran-20 year man) has had two catastrophic illnesses and hasn't paid a penny for care. We are fortunate to live near 3 of the top 5 VA hospitals and many of the VA hospitals are connected to major teaching Universities. Basically, the care is as good as any hospital. In fact because of those illnesses my BF is now legally blind and the doctor at Vanderbilt is sending him to what he said is the best low vision hospital in the country, the VA hospital in Birmingham. Cost: $0 for what will be a 4 to 8 week in-patient stay.

Memories die hard and I wonder how many of those people that called us baby killers are struggling to pay their Medicare co-pays while my BF and I pay zero. We don't even have to pay into Medicare so that's like a $200 monthly raise for us both.

On the business side, years ago I was going to open up a small boatbuilding business in conjunction to a friend who was going to start building his own large sport fishing yacht business. Both of us were marine engineers. We picked the old Pacemaker site in New Jersey because we had both used the facilities before and the property had been used for boatbuilding for over 200 years. We didn't want to screw up a new property because of the inevitable spills. The epa made it a requirement that we dig up over 5 feet of topsoil and replace it before we could begin. Do you have any idea how expensive replacing over 10 acres of soil is?
The end result was my friend decided to outsource his boats to Malta and after the first pieces of crap got delivered from Malta I had a small business repairing their poor work, but I was than doing repairs so there were different regulations for that. This all resulted in the loss of over 200 jobs there would have been if we had both been given permission to use the initial property that already had 200 years of contaminated soil.