The underlying premise to your entire post is the ironclad assumption that "we need to care for the elders" pre-supposes a massive government program.

Go back through your post. Who exactly is "we?"

This is a common approach. For example, the perfectly valid concept "children should be educated," a statement few would disagree with, slides without any intermediate stops into the conclusion "we need vastly greater amounts of money in the government education system."

Anyone who states that maybe the current system isn't all that hot, that there might be other ways to go about educating kids, ways other than a massive Federal program, is immediately assumed to be arguing against the statement "children should be educated." See how often you can find this trick in discussions like this.

How many times have I said we need to find alternatives to budget crushing entitlements for the elderly, only to be immediately accused of hating old people?

And when did taking care of your mother, father and grandparents automatically become "somebody else's problem," even for children who are well-off?

Can liberals even think outside the government box at all?

...even if, as many of us of the female gender do, without pay in our own homes at the inconsequential job of raising children -- you ought to be able to spend the years in which you are too old to work in security and dignity without some whippersnapper asserting that you are on the dole.

Mary Anne, if someone is getting government money in their old age, especially those who didn't even pay Social Security taxes, I'm sorry, but they ARE on the dole. This doesn't mean that such a program to aid those who cannot live any other way is not defensible, or even a good idea, but can we please stop trying to pretend that money extracted from taxpayers to pay out to people who get it simply from need is not welfare?

The negative connotation of these words are the last vestiges of a society which used to think receiving unearned reward from the labor of others was not an ideal situation, that there is a moral issue involved, and that even if you landed there from bad luck or other circumstance, the objective was to get out of it as fast as possible.

The Left is doing it's damnedest to redefine this entire concept. God forbid someone living on welfare should get the idea that somehow this is a bad thing, or that they don't have a "right" to other people's money. In California, it's been proposed to give welfare recipients credit cards, so they don't have a "stigma" associated with it.

The irony is that honest poor people who try their best to stay off the dole until they have no other choice end up suffering more for their moral code, while those who think the world owes them a living rake it in as long as possible.