Essentially, you are saying that 50% of the population have become a liability upon the remaining 50%.
The problem is your view of the issue - completely lacking in any sense of the collective welfare of the society.
You know, you can go back to the idea when our country was founded, when 90% of the country was agrarian (farming). People could just live on the land and grow food and be ok. Then the cities with the other 10% had a lot of small businesses. There were no 'mega corporations' with more revenue than most countries.
There are a lot of benefits to the changes in the economy since then - but those changes also make it a lot more expensive for people to live, a lot more dependent on those 'big corporations' that have developed, and the massive fortunes the changes produce go into very few hands, where they have been used to take the political power away from the people and put it into the hands of those few.
And suddenly, 'the people' become a 'burden' on the few who benefit from these changes, because we have not ensured that the benefits of the new economy are shared. We don't say to the big corporations, 'good, create that wealth, and as JFK said a rising tide will lift all boats - no, instead, create that wealth with changes that make it harder for many to live, and you keep almost all of it, and we'll call the people a burden.'
These changes create very real problems, where the people DO become 'burdens' in many cases - and the logical result is to create pressure to simply kill off the 'unneeded burdens'. Is that the society we want, that we intended, to have the American people displaced by powerful new economic organizations and harmed by them, left powerless and 'burdens'?
We're so good at pointing out the flaws of communism, and so blind to the flaws of our own system.
If see our society as one in which every person has value, and we want all to do well, it's not that hard - we can have things like guaranteed employment when the private system falls short, or public services that are very affordable with all this new wealth, to float all the boats, IF we give a crap about the people.
Or, we can adopt your views, that they are 'burdens', and criminalize their poverty and leave them killed, jailed, or struggling against needs for housing, food, medicine, and say, 'who cares', those citizens don't matter, only the ones who are needed by the 'new economy' are of value and interest. These are real choices we need to make. Currently, we're letting the 'people don't matter' side win more.
'Democracy' is giving people that value artificially.
That's what a 'vote' is. Saying, you aren't just a powerless person where only money counts; you have the same one vote to ensure everyone is cared for as the rich person. Dollars are far from equal, but votes are one per person.
And that was an intentional choice. Human history was filled with small numbers of 'elites' who took all the wealth for themselves, and made the public serve them - with taxes, as soldiers in wars for profit, in many ways.
The American experiment was to say, let's try making the people the rulers instead of a small number of elite.
That's the heart of the American system - the opposite of what the pressures of the 'new economy' are to do, creating the new economic royals, and making many people a 'burden'.
Making it worse, while historically, people could at least farm or similar, today's technology makes them unneeded 'burdens' like never before. We need less and less labor, less and less farming outside of corporate, mechanized farms, but we have done little to adjust our politics to care about the people affected. And people like you would discard them as burdens, instead of making our economy serve the people, instead of people serving the economy.
