Texas Medicaid Refund: Fill & Download for Free

I actually occasionally give a talk to young people on this very topic to illustrate the magic of compound interest and savings.Let’s assume you are a “normal” minimum wage worker, making $7.25/hr, working 40 hours per week, and 50 weeks per year (two weeks unpaid vacation or medical). That means you make a whopping $14,500 per year. Luckily at this level you’d qualify for SNAP (food help in Texas), Medicaid, and maybe a federal program (cell phone) or two (though I would suggest moving to another state, Texas’s welfare benefits really aren’t that good compared to other states).That said, if you save 10% of your money ($1,450) per year, but you’d also get back most of your taxes, as well as an earned income credit (if you’re single) of $519. If you save all of that (tax refund plus 10%), you would be saving about $2,000/year.For those that want to know what this means, it is $29 out of your $290 weekly check each week.Put that into a tax free ROTH IRA invested into broad market ETFs. If you average 7.5% over the next 50 years (so by retirement), you would have $1.037 MILLION saved. Without doing anything else.At this point, you could retire, pull your social security, and pull out 3% or so per year and live on $60k/year. In other words, 4x your previous standard of living. By only pulling out 3%, you leave a nest egg to help your kids. Assume you live another 15 years, you would kick the bucket with over $2m in the bank, so each of your two kids gets $1m.Assuming they’re about 40 by this point, and they don’t touch it until they retire at 65, they’d retire with $3m in the bank.Boom, in one generation, fabulous wealth. Your yourself did it in 50 years — at minimum wage.What can hurt this?Nothing is more insidious than inflation. When you hear about the “government setting interest rates” or “target inflation,” what the really means is “how much is the government going to steal from you in the value of your money.” Inflation is not good, ever. Economists who say otherwise are idiotic government shills who have no understanding of the real world. Inflation is silent taxation, which hurts the poor the most.Small rant aside, ANYONE can become a millionaire in the United States. Literally anyone, even a minimum wage worker, who never receives any kind of raise. Those who can save more, faster, tend to get to that point quicker.

And there it is: the real problem with unchecked illegal immigration. Most of the people that come here illegally will become wards of the state. Fully 60% of illegals end up on welfare and if they are in the country 10 years or longer that number jumps to 70%. In other words, as people without higher education or skills continue to come, we must all share in the burden of their care. This is wrong on so many levels.Now about free healthcare. I don’t get free healthcare. Do you?Why should someone who has violated our sovereign law be rewarded by free healthcare that our citizens don’t even get? Do we really want to expand on the already vast number of benefits given to illegals? Not if we want to discourage this type of behavior.I admit to being largely ignorant to the extent of this problem until I moved to the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. Here I discovered how many access their welfare benefits. In the capacity of my job at the time, I had to prequalify couples for financing. While I was interviewing a young couple I learned that the man worked as a mechanic under the table so he paid no taxes. His wife (they were married in Mexico) did not work but received $710/month for each of her children through SSI. (The scam worked like this…get your kids jacked up on sugar, doctor diagnoses kids with learning disability, attention deficit disorder, etc…and some doctors down here…especially medicaid doctors are complicit)In addition she received child support of $1500/ month from a different baby daddy and food stamps and medicaid. (Because welfare had no knowledge of her husband living in the house. When I asked about savings, they were doing very well with over $40,000 saved (how many of us couldn’t save a lot of money if our groceries and healthcare were paid by the government, we didn’t have taxes deducted from our income, and received $2100/month to live on?) This woman was 25 years old and living better than most retirees. Also she had a social security number (he didn’t) so when tax time came around, she could file for earned income credit and probably get $3000-$5000 refund of money she never paid in. Now do we see why they are unwilling to wait and try to come here legally?If this makes you see red, you are not alone. And this has nothing to do with race …it is about what is right/ legal vs what is wrong/illegal. Why should US taxpayers foot the bill for citizens of other countries? Because these non-citizens are getting benefits, how many citizens are either not getting theirs or getting less than they should? These are the questions we should ask when we file taxes and get less that we expected or have to write a check!So no, it is not right to give free healthcare to illegals. That being said, we do have a responsibility to render aid to anyone whose life is in peril when they cross but that cost should be subtracted from any future payments given to their home country.

I worked at a call center for government assistance phones.Basically, these phones are free to people who need them. You get 60 free minutes (maybe 90) a month as long as you have Medicaid, Medicare, ebt, or some other assistance.Anyways, the call center I was in I did everything for this particular phone company. I helped people buy minutes, I helped people activate phones, troubleshooting, emergency minutes, even where they could go that day to register for said phone.It's a normal day. We're not busy but we're also not slow so it's kind of steady.My next call, we'll call her Karen needs to update her IMEI number on her new phone.I instruct her where to find the numbers she would need and to please let me know when she had the numbers so she could read them to me.A few minutes of silence go by, and we're supposed to keep the calls under a certain time limit.I remember that I tentatively asked if she had the numbers ready. Evidently it was the wrong thing to ask… (Y'know… even though I told her to let me know when she did…)Karen starts exploding. She shouts at me that I'm an idiot and that I should go back to my home country. (She used some very racist slangs about Hispanics and I'm from Texas so even though I may not be Hispanic I was offended by it.)She continues yelling at me and accusing me of thinking she was an idiot. Which honestly only made her think of her as an idiot. Finally she starts demanding for ‘an American supervisor so she didnt have to put up with my mexican a**.’So what do I do? One of my friends was a lead agent. That means that he's not a supervisor but hes been trained to deal with escalated call.Anyway, my friend is also Hispanic and I told him what she had been saying and he instantly took over the call.Let's just say, Karen wasnt happy being put in her place and being threatened to have her phone removed from its service for her behavior towards the companies employees. My friend also told her that she needed to shut up and listen. Even then Karen was bitching about my incompetence.Dont be a Karen… no one likes a Karen. (No offense to anyone who has the name.)I have another good one but I'll save it for another day.Edit: I just want to say thanks for the upvotes. I’m going to go ahead and add in my second Karen story from the call center.Karen called saying that they had purchased a 20 dollar phone card to our company. They said that the gas station wouldn’t return it.Even though Karen read that we didn’t do refunds they were still calling for us to refund the 20 dollars.I had to explain at least five times that we couldn’t accept refunds on cards. The only refunds we could do at the call center were for things like canceling an upgraded phone. We can’t even refund minutes because we can’t remove minutes from the account, and once they’re added they’re there.So, finally Karen gets frustrated and begins yelling that the gas station won’t take the card back and it’s our fault that we don’t have our phone cards working with the other phone company. They continue ranting until they finally ask me what I expected them to do with a 20 dollar card they couldn’t use.I decided to tell them what I personally would do. I suggested that they see if anyone they know or anyone their friends know someone that uses our phone company to see if they could buy the card from them so Karen could get their money back. I thought it was a perfectly reasonable response.Karen did not agree. As mentioned earlier, I dealt with government assistance phones. So Karen begins yelling I remember word for word for what they said because I didn’t understand what I said to make them think that. “What? You think that just because I’m on a government phone that I can’t afford to lose 20 dollars? Just because I’m on a government phone that I’m that poor.”“No I w-”“I. Want. A. Manager.”“I unders-”“Manager.”And then I transferred them to a lead agent. It went to someone who I knew but wasn’t really friends with so I don’t know how the call ended. I’m guessing not well for Karen.