Forget welfare you want social security disability. Ask any democrat on this board how to get it. It's exploding the last 4 years. Say you have a bad back or better yet a psychiatric condition. Contact a disability lawyer and in under a year you will have a check for life, food stamps, health care,free phone and housing assistance. You can workout all you want because the problem in with you mind not your body. On the side you can detail cars for cash. Why would anyone work selling burgers when they can live the good life off the suckers who work and pay taxes?
I guess things have changed in the last decade when it comes to SSD. My wife "retired" at 60 after working all of her adult life. The actual reason she stopped working was because she has a plethora of health issues. Besides suffering type II diabetes since she was 34, she had acquired all the health problems that accompany this disease. These include diabetic retinopathy, failing kidneys, congestive heart failure and a thyroid condition. In addition she has osteoarthritis, which was so severe in her knees that both of them have been replaced.
Fortunately, her employer was very accommodating, allowing her to park on the sidewalk near the entrance to the building where her office was and providing special technology so she could see her computer monitor. Despite all this, she was simply too sick to continue working and so she retired. Unlike many folks, she'd planned for her eventual retirement and has a decent pension. However, when she applied for SSD, they denied it on the first two tries. Eventually, she hired an attorney and was awarded SSD six months prior to being eligible for SSI at 62. Her combined income from SSD and the pension is about half what she made when she worked.
My wife and I are both Democrats. Here is how you get SSD: you get so sick that you cannot work at all despite the fact that you actually may have liked working. Then you apply for SSD and if you are lucky after a couple of denials (they allways deny you on the first try, I'm told) your lawyer will get a court date for you that is less than 2 years out. If you live long enough, you will start getting SSD checks. After two more years, you will be eligible for Medicare. Keep in mind, the amount you receive is based on how much you paid into the program over many years of working. So, do not expect to get anything near what you made when you worked.