provide assistance to "the poor" -- that phrase in quotes because something like 70% of all Americans get some sort of governmental assistance and to assert that 70% of all Americans are "poor" is ludicrous. The mechanisms by which these programs are collapsing are different, but lead to the same result. Social Security and Medicare will be the victims of demographics -- an ageing population. This is something that the creators of these systems should have foreseen and made allowances for -- indexing retirement age to average life-span, for example. All the various "poor" programs are victims of both the human tendency to exert as little effort for the greatest possible gain -- "They'll pay me not to work? Cool!" -- and the politician's tendency to try to buy votes in the short term, leaving the long-term consequences for his successors to deal with. Both of these problems are inevitable -- no system can be perfectly designed, and "fixing" Social Security won't be politically possible -- and humans will go on being humans. And both of these circumstances are why no government, ever, should try to help some individuals at the expense of others. It will inevitably snow-ball. Unforeseen, uncorrectable, design flaws will doom systems like Social Security, while the lack of a limiting feed-back process will doom "assistance" programs. "First, do no harm." Politically, that should probably be rephrased as, "First, do no net harm." Yes, all these government feel-good programs help a lot of people, but, in the