I just read an article defending the position that Social Security payments should be the equivalent of welfare--paid only to those too sick and infirm to work. Your Gradnma and Grandpa, if well enough, should stay out there, pushing pixels around or flipping burgers or socializing other peoples' children so they, too, can keep on working into their 70's and 80's.

I can see it now. A whole new black market in phony illness records so that people who have been law-abiding productive citizens their whole lives can take a few years off before they die. Because it *is* the productive workers who have contributed to Social Security in the first place, not the ones who have spent years already on some kind of public assistance and will continue to do so.

So here is the result of the proposal by the author of the article: At my next birthday I will have been supporting myself and various other members of my family for 50 years. Think about it. 50 years. Longer than most of my co-workers (including my boss) have been alive. And just because I'm healthy and still able to work, I'm supposed to continue to drag my sorry ass to work untill I drop dead behind my desk?

Or until I'm so ill and decrepit that I can't click a mouse or read a report or answer the telephone? Let's see...you can wheel my guerney into the office and I can slip on the headphone and still answer calls and transfer them to the appropriate office. So I really never will have to retire and be the recipient of that infamous Social Security. No, not an acceptable scenario. Anybody know a sympathetic doctor?