Day: January 20, 2005

The concluding issue of our little miniseries. Whad’ja think?

PAD

On this national day of mourning, a.k.a. Inauguration Day, I am going to offer a radical idea on how to fix Social Security. Ready? Here it is.

We stop sending Americans to get killed.

Consider: At the end of “Schindler’s List,” it is stated that due to the 1100 Jews saved because of Schindler, the result was 6000 Jews who lived that would never have been born.

So over a period of ten years back in the 1960s, we lost 50,000 Americans. I’m not mathematician enough to calculate the number of Americans who were never born as a result: Americans added to the workforce, whose salaries would have contributed to social security, or who would have founded companies to hire people whose salaries, etc. But I would not hesitate to guess that would be a lot of warm bodies, all paying in to the program.

But they were killed or never existed. If, as Bush and Company believe, life begins at conception, then certainly they must give a nod toward conception that won’t occur.

Apparently, though, not so much. Because there’s already 1300 names on Bush’s list. So that’s…what? Another 6500 Americans who won’t be born over the next thirty years? We can’t even begin to wrap ourselves around the immensity of the tragedy involved in the sheer waste of young life. We can barely comprehend the “Daily News” headline that reads “Iran Next! Secret US commando teams already inside to identify potential targets, report claims.” So instead we must dwell on the pragmatic aspects, because the human horror and waste of American lives (not to mention Iraqi lives ranging anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000) is just too ghastly to contemplate.

Fix Social Security. Stop Bush’s list from growing.

PAD