The Prince of Lies

Right before the Supreme Court decision on equal marriage, a church in Virginia posted a sign reading, "Remember Satan was the first to demand equal rights" and a scripture, Isaiah 14:12-17:

Photo and info from WAVY.com.

Liz Palka at WAVY writes that the pastor

said the message doesn’t target a specific group. He said it’s about evil, referencing Satan trying to be equal with God, and he said he stands up for what scripture says.

Well, let's assume that's correct, and not touch on the obvious equality implications (which might make us assume blacks and women are evil in this pastor's eyes).  What does the passage say?

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:  I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? (KJV)

Yet... that's not exactly what it says.  That is, the word translated "Lucifer" in the KJV was not a proper name - instead, it was the Latin word "lucifer" meaning "light-bringing" or "morning star," AKA the planet Venus (source).

Seeing that, we can and should read the rest of Isaiah 14 for context:

That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!  (Isaiah 14:4, KJV)

Ohhhh, it's talking about the king of Babylon, not Satan.  That makes much more sense, especially since it says "you shalt be brought down to hell," which we would assume had already happened to Satan if he had challenged God and desired to be equal.

This is the only place in the Bible that has been mistranslated to be about Satan's origins showing him as an angel cast out of Heaven.  The passage even says "I will ascend into heaven," meaning the person in question didn't start out there - impossible if Satan was an angel.

Rather, our belief that Satan was an angel who defied God, got cast out of Heaven, and wound up as prince of Hell, comes from John Milton.  The KJV version of the Bible came out right around the same time as Milton was born, and heavily influenced his work (source).  Paradise Lost is where we get the concept of an army of angels, too, as explained in this summary:

It also includes the story of the origin of Satan. Originally, he was called Lucifer, an angel in heaven who led his followers in a war against God, and was ultimately sent with them to hell. Thirst for revenge led him to cause man's downfall by turning into a serpent and tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. 

Raphael recounts to them how jealousy against the Son of God led a once favored angel to wage war against God in heaven, and how the Son, Messiah, cast him and his followers into hell. (source)

No such thing occurred in the Bible.  Satan is not a fallen angel, is not someone who went up against God and lost.  Sorry, but your entire concept of Satan is wrong.

And a church pastor should know better.

Economics 101

A Facebook commenter said the following:

the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money

So now, I feel the need to give a basic lesson in economics to the serially-idiomatic.

On this planet, we have a limited pool of money.  That money represents human capital - that is, every dollar was bought with someone's labor.  A million bucks is the same as 137,931 man hours at minimum wage (which is more than the average amount of hours a person will actually work in a lifetime - thus, a million bucks is a little more valuable than a human life in the U.S.). 

For these reasons, as long as people are working, there will always be money representing their work.

But, let's assume that all of the jobs somehow dry up, too.  If we were to freeze all work, right now, we would still have all of our amassed wealth.

See, wealth and income are different.  Wealth is the amount of money you've stored up.  Income is the amount of money you receive for your work.  Wealth is your house, your car, your land, your clothes, your electronics, and so on.  Everything you own.  It's also your stocks, your money in the bank, and so on.

According to Credit Suisse, the U.S. has 83.7 trillion dollars of wealth, which accounts for 31.8% of total global wealth.  Per household, that's about $348,000 in wealth.  Of course, I don't know too many people with $348,000 in total assets, and I'm certainly not one of them.  That's because of the growing wealth inequality in America, which is causing the biggest gains in wealth to go to the richest among us.

We could sell every asset in America to other countries, redistribute everything, and still manage to cover wages for more than 10 years - and that's assuming that all the money for all those things is now leaving the country and not coming back out to other Americans.

But that's also not what's happening.  In the U.S., the GDP was 17.4 trillion in 2014.  The U.S. spends only a little less than 42 billion importing goods (over our exports) right now, which represents only 0.24% of that total.  The vast majority of our GDP is spent inside the U.S. - that means that 99.76% of American money stays in America.  Most of that money is circulating.

So it's physically impossible for the money to simply disappear.  Instead, it circulates - and for the most part, it circulates within the system that created it.  It will never dry up. 

There is something, however, that can dry up the well: savings.  In a strong economy, people naturally save up money for harder times ahead, though if they didn't, times would be even more prosperous but we'd lack a safety net.  Newsweek explains how this is going horribly wrong right now:

Which brings us back to the savings rate. You've already seen that in normal recessions, the savings rate goes down and cushions the blow to consumer spending. But now we are in the midst of a strange kind of backward recession. As lenders retrench, instead of the savings rate going down it is, in fact, going up. This is what economists call "de-leveraging": In economic terms our "savings" go up because our borrowing goes down. This isn't savings as you normally think of it. It's an enforced regime of austerity thrust upon us because having relied on debt for so many years, we have no way to keep funding consumption.  (source)

Banks' savings are taking that money out of the economy.  The exact problem the Facebook commenter complained about is happening, just not for the reasons he thought.

A Dirty Shame

On September 3rd, a video went up on youtube that has been getting a lot of press.  I will link that video below, though I suggest you NOT watch it, both to keep its view count down and to prevent getting you angry.

The video is titled "Dear Fat People" and it's a message directed at those of us who have struggled with our weight.  Among its claims is that "Fat-shaming is not a thing," and this isn't the first time I've heard that argument.  So, let's talk about shame a bit.

Dr. Marc Miller offers this information about what shame is and how it's caused:

Shame is often experienced as the inner, critical voice that judges whatever we do as wrong, inferior, or worthless. Often this inner critical voice is repeating what was said to us by our parents, relatives, teachers and peers. We may have been told that we were naughty, selfish, ugly, stupid, etc. We may have been ostracized by peers at school, humiliated by teachers, treated with contempt by our parents. Paradoxically, shame may be caused by others expecting too much of us, evoking criticism when our performance is less than perfect. Some authority figures are never satisfied with one's efforts or performance, they are critical no matter what. Unfortunately, these criticisms become internalized, so that it is our own inner critical voice that is meting out the shaming messages, such as: "You idiot, why did you do that?," "Can't you do anything right?,"or " You should be ashamed of yourself," etc. (source)

Shame, then, is the feeling that you have failed at something, and feeling remorse over it.  It's failing to meet your own expectations and the expectations of those important to you.

When we shame others, we do so by pointing out their failings in a very negative way.  That is, it's one thing to acknowledge failure and offer encouragement to succeed at it in the future ("nice try, you'll get it next time"), and quite another to make fun of the person for failing.  The second is the one Miller offers is the one to be internalized negatively, so that our own inner voice says the same horrible things.

And, for many of us who fail at something we strive for continuously, those voices can be always present.  It's easy for other people to trigger them again, because they've been such a part of our psyche for such a long time.

As such, shame can destroy a person's self-esteem and make it impossible for that person to feel good enough about himself or herself to try to change - that is, it when we have self-esteem, we believe that we can succeed at things we attempt, and can give another shot at doing the thing we've so often failed at.

For some people, the fear of shame is enough to spur them to action, which is why we occasionally see people take those moments of shame and fight back against them, succeeding despite the adversity. That said, it's a big risk to take - you could help someone fine the strength to succeed, but you could also cause them to fail, and worse, to hate themselves enough to end the fight in a more final manner.

Shaming requires a few things:

• The target of the shaming knowing something is good
• The target desiring that something
• The target failing at that something
• Ridicule of the target for failing to achieve that goal

When Nicole Arbour says "fat-shaming is not a thing," we can test it against those objectives:

• Do fat people know that being fat is unhealthy?  (Yes)
• Do fat people desire to be thin? (I can't speak for all, but given the multi-billion dollar diet industry, I'd say this is true for the majority.  So yes.)
• Do fat people fail at dieting? (Again, multi-billion dollar diet industry.  Yes.)
• Are Arbour and others ridiculing them for failing? (Yes)

So, objectively, fat-shaming is a thing.

But then, Ardour says that it's "the race card with no race."  Let's try to unpack that statement.

First is the idea of the race card as an attempt to claim justification for something purely based on race.  It's an exploitation of race.  That's not to say that "the race card" does or doesn't exist; rather, people think it does or doesn't exist, and that others are using or not using it, based on their prejudices (here I do not use the word prejudice to necessarily mean "hatred of a race," but rather in its original definition of pre-judgement or inclination, though certainly they are connected). 

Thus, she's claiming that arguments about "fat shaming" are simply attempts to exploit obesity for political or social gain. 

Which of course is true - in that the social gains that fat people are trying to achieve are gains to simply be recognized as human beings instead of being objectified as "fat people."

Thus, it seems that what Arbour is saying is that fat people deserve to be objectified based on their weight, and thus deserve to be mocked and ridiculed for that weight.

And if you can't see what's wrong with believing that a human being is just an object deserving ridicule, then I can't help you.

But if you agree that fat people are human, with human foibles and human thoughts and feelings, then you should also understand how bloody difficult weight loss is.  It's really easy to gain weight.  All you have to do is eat what you're told.  But because science has been manipulated by a ginormous food industry (a food industry that has acted much like the cigarette industry in the time when science was starting to prove smoking was bad, by blocking legislation and using a huge propaganda campaign to push back against it) and because news media is notoriously bad at reporting on science, there's a huge amount of misinformation out there on what healthy eating is.  We're making strides in that department, but it's huge uphill battle.  And the result of that misinformation is that losing weight is hard.

It's even harder because sugar, the leading cause of weight gain, is more addictive than cocaine and heroin. 

While some people naturally metabolize this sugar better, that tends to be only while they're young.  In fact, there are two kinds of fat.  The fat you usually see is called "subcutaneous fat" and exists close to the surface. On most of the body, it's innocuous.  Tummy fat - both subcutaneous and visceral fat - is deadly  (source).  But a person can be thin and still have heavy deposits of visceral fat.  As a result, they can appear quite healthy and still be at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and so on.  As people get older, their muscles and good fats become less efficient at burning energy, and the fat storage accelerates.

Meaning some day, Arbour could join the ranks of the obese, without changing her diet or routine in any way.

She better hope fat-shaming ends by then.

Earning a living

I mentioned something in my post on Social Security and Welfare - that is, that 73% of those who earn welfare are in working families (families with at least one person working a full time job).  There are a few reasons why this might be the case.

Imagine that you are someone who has work experience, has a 4-year degree, but has been out of work for a while.  In your particular town or city, the work you're qualified for either doesn't exist or has too many people working in the field.  You don't have a bad reputation, you just can't get work.

You used unemployment while it was available, and you didn't slack off looking for work during that time, but you still failed to find anything.  Now, those unemployment benefits have run out, and your family is hungry.  During a more prosperous time in your life, you and your spouse had two or three children, but that prosperity dried up.  Now, you have mouths to feed.

Your spouse has similar problems finding work.

What do you do?  You take a job.  Any job.  Anything at all that can help put a roof over your kids' heads, food in their bellies, clothes on their backs. 

So you go to work at a fast food restaurant, and you find a job paying $7.25 an hour.  It's the only thing that's offered.  And so you work.

Working there pays $290/week.  Even the cheap apartment you found costs twice that, so you're left with only about $600 for the entire month to try to get through the month.  Your spouse can't afford to work full time - someone has to be there for the kids, and babysitting or daycare would cost more than your spouse could bring in at minimum wage. 

For reference, it costs about $50/month in clothes, $50/month in healthcare, $100/month in food for each child.  That's the entire monthly budget right there, and we haven't even touched transportation (if your cheap apartment isn't anywhere near your minimum wage job, or if you have to travel to see the doctor or go to the grocery store) or costs associated with education... or, for that matter, what you or your spouse will eat.

Sure, you have qualifications that could rescue you from this lifestyle at some point, when some kind of job opens up.  Until then, though, you're out of luck and out of money. 

This is the sort of situation the vast majority of people receiving government assistance are in.  The abysmal pay of those minimum wage jobs are exactly the reason why they need the government to help lift them up and keep them eating and getting to their jobs (if you thought "they don't need a car, they can use the bus" - congratulations on picking the government-sponsored transportation option), and exactly the reason why the government is now helping get them health insurance to keep those medical costs down and help them stretch their budgets further.

Of course, it costs us all money in the form of taxes.  A tiny amount of money.  For every $1 of taxes you pay, 0.0059% of that dollar is welfare; that is, if you pay $10,000 in taxes, you pay about $59 toward welfare (source).

But if that's too much for you, then perhaps you'd be OK with the alternative.  You see, if people such as I described were earning a reasonable living, then their need for welfare would disappear.  Raising the minimum wage to $15 would increase that person's pay from $290/week to $600/week.  If this person also had no tax burden (with 4 dependents, he or she would likely get 100% of taxes back), that means being ale to pay for everything I described and still have about $300 left for transportation or education (such as putting money back for the kids' college), or for finding a bigger place, like a house where they can actually be saving money in equity rather than throwing it out on rent.

That would take the vast majority of that 73% on welfare and remove them from welfare.  It'd mean decreasing that personal bill from $59 out of $10,000 in taxes to just $16 per $10,000. 

"But that will hurt the economy" you might think.  "Raising the minimum wage will make my hamburger cost more, meaning I'll be making functionally less."  Or, "It'll mean fewer jobs for minimum-wage workers."

All I can offer you there is what 600 economists said about the issue:

In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front. (source, emphasis mine)

Suddenly, those minimum-wage workers would have the money to buy things, such as things from restaurants and department stores where other minimum-wage workers work.  The increase in sales volume would more than make up for the losses such companies would endure paying more to their employees.  While certainly some of the more reprehensible companies (I'm looking at you, Papa John's) will protest and say that they'll have to cut hours or reduce the number of employees, the facts just don't support this at all.

 Join the effort for a nationwide increase in minimum wage today, https://berniesanders.com/

Real Citizens United

Citizens United.  In lower case, it refers to the very core of democracy - that is, that citizens can unite around common ideals and goals and evince change.  In capital, it refers to two things: an organization and the Supreme Court decision in a case involving that organization.

The organization speaks of itself in ways that seem to uphold the ideals of democracy:

Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens' control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United's goal is to restore the founding fathers' vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens. (source)

It starts off sounding great - citizens should be in control of the government, and an organization promoting education, advocacy, and grass roots organization means well-educated citizens engaging in the democratic process.  Everything after that speaks to exactly what their definition of a more perfect union looks like, and it's clear from all of their catch phrases ("traditional American values," "limited government," and so on) that their vision is for a Conservative (with a capital C) America. 

But they revealed a lot more when they went to the Supreme Court in the case Citizens United v. FEC.  In extremely brief detail: the group wanted to run its own political advertising, but the FEC said that violated electioneering law.  The SCOTUS decided that this was a freedom of speech issue, that Citizens United had the freedom to spend money however it wanted in order to support or oppose a candidate. 

The basic idea is that for messages to reach the larger public, they must have financial backing.  As a result, money is a necessary component of speech.  And, if money is a necessary component of speech, then freedom of speech requires freedom of money, or the freedom to spend money without regulation on such speech.

Taken on an ideal level, this is great.  Imagine if a million people gave $30 each to support an idea - that $30,000,000 could buy major advertising time on nationwide networks, and help their message reach millions more. 

Unfortunately, we've seen this become problematic, precisely because different people have wildly different amounts of money.  When one person has $20,000, and another has $20,000,000, the person with the millions has 1000 times as much money and therefore 1000 times as much influence over speech. 

And there are people with $20,000,000,000 - which would give them a million times as much influence over speech.

The result is unprecedented independent spending on elections.  Campaign spending had already been growing rapidly (which led to many attempts in the 90s at Campaign Finance Reform), but in 2010, after the Citizens United decision, it exploded.  OpenSecrets.org estimates that in 2008, independent spending was at $338 million.  Just 4 years later, it surpassed $1 billion.  (source)

In 2008, Liberals accounted for 63% of spending.  In 2012, Conservatives dominated, with 71%.  The increase for Liberals was 50%.  The increase for Conservatives was 540%.

While certainly not all of that 540% can be attributed to wealthy donors, the majority of it can - $412 million of the $720 million spend on the election by Conservatives was from the Koch brothers.


To a certain and very limited extent, this is actually a good thing.  After all, despite the Kochs dropping so much on the election, Obama still won.  Thus, their money was "wasted" on their ultimate goal, but did serve society by reentering society.  Their spending went into the coffers of major media organizations, which spent that money, etc. on down the line.  It was one of the few times that trickle-down economics actually trickled.

That said, such money only gets spent in "Battleground" states - states where the money might sway public opinion.  Oklahoma is not such a state, and receives little of the resulting money.

Time Magazine offers a state-by-state breakdown.  Their figures show that Oklahoma received a measly 0.435% of the total campaign expenditures in 2012 (despite having 1% of the national population). 

The goal of the Supreme Court in the decision was making speech more free, and, ironically, they ended up further restricting it.

Think about the last time you went to a loud rock concert or nightclub, and how you had to shout to be overheard by the person right next to you, let alone the person across the table.  That's the effect of unlimited campaign spending.  Those with billions to throw at campaigns are the ones on stage, blasting their message as loud and obnoxiously as possible, while the rest of us are left desperately shouting at each other in an attempt to be heard.

Certainly, sometimes our message gets through to one or two people, but no one else in the room can possibly hear it.  That's always been a problem with free speech, especially with a free media as well - the media can choose whose voices to promote and whose to repress - but now the media's choice is between those willing to spend billions on advertising and those who cannot.  And, that's really a false choice, because no one chooses to lose that kind of money.

This might be fine, if the messages promoted by the wealthy were messages that benefited all of us.  Sadly, that's not the case.  As I've pointed out previously, our incomes haven't been rising.  The Koch Brothers, however, have been making bank:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/22/325612/denier-koch-brothers-worth-50-billion-richest-americans/

Which is exactly what Donald Trump said about money in politics:

“I will tell you that our system is broken,” Trump said on stage in Thursday's GOP candidates' debate. “I gave to many people before this -- before two months ago I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. That's a broken system.” (source)

If we want a free democracy, we need to remove big money from politics, thus returning power to all the people, not just the richest among us.  Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you should be able to see how the system is rigged against you by this decision.  There are nominally only two politicians running who are fighting back against this system - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  Trump is already one of the richest Americans, so he's an insider of the very system he's working against.  Sanders is more an average guy - worth enough to be upper-middle-class, certainly, perhaps even upper class, but not worth much more than that.  He is, in fact, the poorest person in the U.S. Senate. 

That's one of the things that makes him different, and his grassroots organization, which has avoided PAC funding, is proof that he can organize people and raise money without relying on the Citizens United decision.  He's our best bet for getting it overturned.

But he needs your help. 

Go to https://berniesanders.com/ today to volunteer and help spread his message.  Let's put an end to unlimited campaign spending by rich people seeking to get richer by buying the government.  Let's make government work for all of us.  It's good for America.  It's good for Oklahoma.

Social Security and Welfare

Saw a copy of the following running around on Facebook this week:

From Sodahead

This makes a few claims:

1. That Social Security and Welfare are similar.
2. Social Security is in danger of running out of money.
3. Welfare isn't.
4. That Social Security is only received by those who worked for it.
5. That Welfare is only received by those who don't work at all. 
6. It's right for people who worked for money to receive benefits.

Let's address them one at a time:

SOCIAL SECURITY
Social Security is run by the Social Security Administration, an independent agency within the government.  Its website explains that it "is financed through a dedicated payroll tax" of 12.4% of your income, half of which is paid by your employer if you are not self-employed (source). Only your income up to $118,500 is taxed in this way - anything above that is tax-free, meaning that someone earning $1,000,000 per year is paying an effective tax of 1.47%.

Social security benefits are determined as follows:

We base Social Security benefits on your lifetime earnings. We adjust or “index” your actual earnings to account for changes in average wages since the year the earnings were received. Then Social security calculates your average indexed monthly earnings during the 35 years in which you earned the most. We apply a formula to these earnings and arrive at your basic benefit, or “primary insurance amount.” This is how much you would receive at your full retirement age—65 or older, depending on your date of birth. (source)

So, someone who works *ever* - such as someone who works for two years and then quits (explained below), to retire, go on medical leave, disability, etc - is eligible for benefits.  The amount of the benefits are determined by how much the person puts into the system.

Retirement age was raised a few years back so that anyone born after 1960 cannot retire until 67 to receive full benefits.  (Interestingly, if you work until 70, you can earn more per year - quite substantially more, in fact.  For me, it'd be almost 25% more.)

Social Security also pays disability or death benefits.  When someone dies and leaves behind minor children, those children (and their remaining parent) earn a very significant amount of money (more combined than if the dearly departed had gone on disability, and disability is roughly equivalent to retiring at full retirement age) until the child is 18.

Before we get into "Welfare," I'd also like to throw in Medicare, since that is funded in a similar manner as Social Security.  It's a flat 2.9% (half for employer, as above); however, Medicare *has no cap*.  This will become important to the discussion later.


WELFARE
When we speak of Welfare as a thing different from Medicare or Social Security, we refer to 77 separate programs providing a variety of assistance - from food programs (such as SNAP benefits and school lunch programs) to housing (most notably HUD), to education (Pell Grants, Even Start, Title One, and so on), to medical (most notably Medicaid), to child care (notably Head Start), to community development, and on and on.

What we imagine, however, is something a bit different: an organization within the government that is tasked with handing out a 700 billion dollar chunk of cash, that looks for people who are not working at all and pays them to stay at home and pop out babies.  If this department exists, it exists as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (or TANF).

That imagery - and specifically the idea of the "Welfare Mother" who was predominantly black and single, and who had kids just to earn money on welfare without having to work - was a big part of the 1990s welfare reform movement that culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which reformed the branch of welfare known now as TANF (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC).

Of that 700 billion the federal government spends annually on Welfare programs not counting Medicare and Social Security, less than 7 billion, or less than 1%, goes into TANF.  (States pay a roughly equal amount into the program.)  This comes out of the general tax and is determined by the federal budget - meaning that Congress has complete control over how much is put into this and other Welfare programs each year, and the revenue stream is not dedicated.

TANF is notably temporary; that is, it lasts for a maximum of 2 years at a time, and up to 5 years over a lifetime.  No one who is earning it is staying at home for their entire lives farming TANF.

Even if they were, which they're clearly not, TANF's maximum payout is abysmal.  Last year, the Congressional Research Service put out a report titled Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): Eligibility and Benefit Amounts in State TANF Cash Assistance Programs.  You don't need to read the mere 31 pages of awesomeness - the abstract alone is a gold mine.  It explains the problem with maximum benefits:

In July 2012, the state with the lowest maximum benefit paid to a family consisting of a single parent and two children was Mississippi, with a benefit of $170 per month (11% of poverty-level income). Among the contiguous 48 states and the District of Columbia, the highest maximum benefit was paid in New York: $770 per month for a single parent of two children in New York City (48% of poverty-level income). The benefit for such a family in the median state (North Dakota, whose maximum benefit ranked 26th among the 50 states and District of Columbia), was $427, a benefit amount that represented 27% of monthly poverty-level income in 2012. TANF maximum benefits vary greatly by state; there is also a very apparent regional pattern to benefit amounts. States in the South tend to have the lowest benefit payments; states in the Northeast have the highest benefits.

$170 per month.  And, while such a person is also eligible to receive some other limited benefits (HUD benefits to provide Section 8 housing, SNAP benefits to provide some food), such a person is still far below the poverty line, and definitely struggling to earn enough to keep children in clothes, much less fed and secure enough to do well in school.


So, what's the bottom line for #1? 
Social Security is a social welfare program, but it is not similar to TANF or any other welfare program besides Medicare.  It relies on a dedicated funding stream, and provides benefits for much longer periods of time than other social programs.


Social Security is running out of money:
Social Security has several problems; notably:

• People are living longer.
• Baby boomers are in their retirement years.
• Richer people are earning more.

People are living longer
This graph shows how life expectancy in the US has increased from 1960 to 2013.  In 1960, it was roughly 70.  That meant that the average person could expect to die 5 years after he or she started to receive social security benefits, so those benefits only had to be paid out for 5 years (on average).  Today, it's almost 79.  Even with the increase in the age at which people start receiving benefits (to 67), that's 12 years of benefits - an increase of 240%.

Baby Boomers are retired
Baby Boomers are those people who were born shortly after WWII, when soldiers returned home from war and celebrated by avoiding being celibate.  Birth rates since have somewhat declined, as shown by this graph.

We normally expect age distribution to be somewhat exponential - with a greater number of children than the number of adults producing them.  That is not, however, what we see:

http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/age_structure.html

While the top of the curve looks like we expect, it's largely to do with how quickly people die off as they get older.  Consider, though, that in that chart, almost everyone over 65 is receiving social security benefits - to the tune of 56 million people today. 

The rich are getting richer
Meanwhile, income hasn't substantially increased for the majority of Americans.  Wages have remained basically stagnant for the last 40 years for the bottom 60% of earners:

Originally from U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, reposted on Real-World Economics Review Blog.

Meanwhile, as is clear from that graph, the top 20% are earning quite a lot (and as I'm sure you've heard, the growth for the top 1% has been massive).

This isn't a gripe about income disparity; rather, it affects Social Security along with the other two points.

Social Security is a kind of pyramid scheme.  When you pay into the system, you aren't putting money away for your own future - rather, that money is going to pay for the Social Security benefits of people currently receiving them.  For Social Security to be successful, it requires two things: growing population and growing wealth.  These two things mean more money coming in than going out.  But when population is distributed the way it is now, the system becomes top-heavy, with too many people receiving funds.

This would be fine if income was also growing. It's the multiplication of people times per capita income that tells us how much income is getting taxed.  If income grows substantially, then population doesn't have to.

And income is growing substantially, but only for those already earning more than the maximum taxable amount.  Take a look at that chart again, and you'll see that the top line - the top quintile - on average has earned more than the maximum taxable rate the entire time, and it's the line that has been substantially growing.  All of the big income gains we've made haven't helped Social Security one jot.

It's for this reason that Bernie Sanders is calling for an end to the tax cap.  As I hope you can see, it's very much needed.  The alternative is to continue raising the Social Security tax rate, or the eligible age, or both (as we've done several times in the past).


Welfare isn't running out of money
Welfare works, as noted, quite a bit differently.  The 700 billion that funds non-SSA, non-Medicare welfare programs comes out of the general federal budget, rather than a dedicated revenue stream.  For this reason, it's dependent upon the whims of Congress each year.  While many welfare programs have grown in size and budget over the past 50 years, TANF - the one I mentioned earlier is the one we really think of when we think of welfare, has shrunk:

Meanwhile, Food Stamps and Medicaid have grown:

Source

Source

The 2008 economic downturn caused dramatic growth in the number of people seeking benefits - growth that far outpaced budget.  SNAP benefits had to be dramatically reduced as a result.  So, when we say "Welfare never runs out" - that's not quite true.  That said, it's theoretically easier for Congress to raise taxes and increase welfare spending than for it to change how Social Security works.  It just depends on who is in control of Congress as to whether or not that happens:

USGovernmentSpending.com

Do people who receive Social Security earn it?
Well, that depends on your definition of "earn," but using what I imagine the proponents of the progenitor argument would say is "receive in due course as a result of working and paying into the system."

If that's their definition, then the answer is "sort of."

You have to have done some work to receive Social Security.  That's because Social Security also pays out for disability and death.  In both cases, you may be able to qualify with a surprisingly small number of work hours.  Age and situation play into it a lot, but a "worst case" would be for someone under the age of 24 who becomes disabled.  Such a person only needed to earn 6 "credits."  Credits are a special system Social Security uses to determine eligibility:

In 2015 ... you earn one credit for each $1,220 of wages or self-employment income. When you've earned $4,880, you've earned your four credits for the year. (source)

That's only 673 hours of work at minimum wage (you get about 2080 in a full time year).  You can only get 4 credits per year, so such a person would've needed to work at least 337 hours in a previous year.

That's relatively easy to achieve.  Even in the best case scenario of someone who became disabled at age 62, such a person only needed to put in 4 credits a year for 10 years (source).

Sure, the benefits might not be much.  Someone aged 20 who goes on disability right now and earned only $7500 in the last 3 years would get $187 monthly, or $2,244 yearly (per the online calculator). But that's yearly for life - so if that person lives another 55 years, he or she will receive over $100,000 - well in excess of the amount paid in.

And the Social Security Administration estimates that 25% of people will become disabled at some point before retirement (source).

Do people who receive Welfare earn it?
Using the same definition of "earn" as above, the answer is still "sort of."  The difference in terms of "earning it" between welfare programs other than Social Security and Social Security is that the funding source isn't dedicated - that is, you don't pay into a fund and get guaranteed payout as a result.

But it's a mistake to think that people on Welfare haven't worked.

According to a report jointly from UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Urban & Regional Planning, "Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of enrollments in America’s major public benefits programs are from working families" (source).  They appear to be counting among those programs the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), SNAP, TANF, and Medicaid.

You might say, "well fine, that means 27 percent didn't."  But among those 27%, we don't know the story - it's possible such people are disabled like in the SSA estimates.  It's possible they're on unemployment and just waiting for something to come in.  According to the likely-biased (though they claim none) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "more than 90 percent of the benefit dollars that entitlement and other mandatory programs spend go to assist people who are elderly, seriously disabled, or members of working households — not to able-bodied, working-age Americans who choose not to work" (source).  Just looking at SNAP benefits, they estimate that 82% of households had at least someone working in the past year (source).

Sadly, better statistics on this subject are not available.

But, just from these, it seems a false narrative to say that people on welfare don't work - rather, the vast majority do work, but are paid abysmally.

It's right for people who worked to receive benefits.
I agree.  That's why I support welfare.  However, it is true that welfare helps keep people in dependency - not because of welfare, but because corporations are abusing welfare to get out of having to pay livable wages.  If you believe that welfare causes dependency, then you should support increasing minimum wage to help pull people out of that dependency.

If not, then you're just a horrible person.