Originally Posted by Val
It's like Bostonian said: they go analyze your income, assets (except your primary residence these days) and savings to see how much they can gouge you.

Giving this some more thought, it seems like most people would get significant benefit from these programs because they don't have much in the way of savings.

It's not so much a trade off in their minds, since they don't really realize that they're trading off anything.

Years ago, when you could actually make money off of interest or investments, this wasn't a problem.

So, it's a wonderful system for the 1980's and 1990's.

The problem being that we're in the 21st century now.