In the introduction to this book, I promised you that it would be inaccurate and poorly researched. I believe that I have more than lived up to that promise.
Still, there are some major issues that I didn’t get to. For example: What should we do about Social Security? This is a big problem! A complicated problem! I had hoped to analyze it in great detail, with many statistics. But I’m out of room, so I’ll try to summarize it with the following chart:
So basically, we’re talking about a system whereby money is transferred from young people, via the federal government, to old people and their pets.
The problem is that the population is aging. Look at the cast of the TV show Friends. These people were young and charming once, but now that they’re in their thirties, it frankly seems kind of pathetic and, yes, weird that all they ever do with their lives is wander in and out of one another’s apartments.
Further televised evidence of the aging of the population can be found by watching the commercials during the evening news, which seem to feature nothing but products designed to enable old people to poop, keep their dentures on, or have sex. It’s only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a product that does all three of these things simultaneously (“Try Polident-enhanced Ex-Lax, now with Viagra!”).
Thus there are more and more old people in this country. The problem is, we’re not generating enough young people to support them. Americans just don’t have babies as often as they used to back in the old days, when the typical American woman churned out a baby every four or five months. Today, when a woman has a baby, she immediately enrolls it in a mother-baby play program, and a mother-baby music program, and a mother-baby aerobics program, and all these other mother-baby programs, so that, between schlepping her baby to all these programs and doing her job, she doesn’t have time to have sex with her husband again until the baby goes to college.
So the bottom line is, we have too many old people in this country, and not enough young people, and the situation is getting worse. This means that the current Social Security system cannot keep working much longer. One solution to this problem would be for Congress to reform the system so that it makes economic sense. This is clearly the most logical solution, so we can safely assume that it will never happen. The current system is simply too popular with old people and their pets, who together form a large and powerful voting bloc.
As I see it, then, if we’re going to solve the Social Security problem, we need to increase the number of young people in this country, while ideally at the same time we decrease the number of old people. How can we do this? I have come up with a practical, three-pronged Action Plan:
Prong One: We hire a band that makes hideously ugly music, such as Limp Bizkit, and we announce that this band will be holding a concert in, let’s say, Nebraska, and that everybody in the entire world under the age of twenty-five can attend this concert for free.
Prong Two: On the day of this concert, we get every newspaper in the United States to print coupons that are good for one free entrée, on that day only, for any person over age sixty-five at any restaurant in Canada or Mexico.
What would happen, of course, is that millions of young foreigners would pour into the United States, while simultaneously a giant caravan of senior citizens driving 1987 Oldsmobiles would be leaving. We would wait for the exactly right moment, and then execute:
Prong Three: We permanently close the borders.
What do you think? It may not be a perfect plan, but I guarantee you it’s better than anything Congress will come up with.
Another subject I had hoped to address in this book is U.S. foreign policy. I have some strong views on this subject, particularly concerning what we should do about “rogue nations,” such as Iraq. I say it’s time we stopped pussyfooting around. I say it’s time we used the ultimate weapon. That’s correct. As shocking as it may sound, I am proposing that if Iraq gives us any more trouble, we have an Air Force bomber fly directly over downtown Baghdad, open the bomb doors, and drop: Lawyers.
Think about it! Even a small number of American lawyers would probably paralyze a nation the size of Iraq within hours. And if the first attack wasn’t enough, we could drop more lawyers. And if that wasn’t enough, we could put parachutes on the lawyers. A cruel tactic, you say? Perhaps, but sometimes cruelty is called for.
Anyway, these are just a couple of the issues that I had hoped to analyze in this book, but, as I say, I am out of space. So in conclusion, let me just say: Thank you for reading this book, and if I said anything in here—anything at all—that offended you, I am truly, from the bottom of my heart, sorry.1
I also want to state that, despite the sometimes-critical tone of this book, I really do think that the United States is a great country. And despite the good-natured “ribbing” I have given to the U.S. government, in reality I have nothing but the greatest respect for our federal workforce, especially the decent, hardworking, and—in my opinion—grossly underpaid employees of the audit division of the Internal Revenue Service. Thank you.
1Not really.