A Government Miracle for Disabled Kids

Dear parent of a formerly disabled child:

Congratulations! I am writing this letter to you as president of the United States to thank you for the contribution that you and your family are about to make toward balancing the budget. Your child has been selected as one of 95,180 children who will no longer be receiving funding under the Supplemental Security Income program. Before the year is over, we hope to add another 50,000 disabled children of formerly poor families to the list.

It gives me great pleasure to write that word “formerly” before poor and disabled, because no one really wants to be poor or disabled, and thanks to the welfare reform bill that Congress passed and I signed into law in 1996, no one has to be. The poor only thought they were poor because they were getting welfare checks, and by forcing them off the welfare rolls, we are eliminating poverty. We have freed those folks from dependency on poverty just as we are now freeing your child from dependency on disability.

You only thought your child had a disability because doctors and other professionals wrote letters providing documentation to that effect to the Social Security Administration. Well, do I have good news for you! Tear up those letters; your child has no special needs requiring extra funding. A review by one of my Social Security administrators based on new guidelines of the welfare reform law has determined that little (FILL IN NAME) is just fine. The level of difficulty in breathing or recognizing the letters of the alphabet has been found not to fall below the levels set by Congress. Isn’t it a relief to learn that your child’s asthma or dyslexia is not really a problem after all?

A personal reevaluation of your child is not deemed necessary, and I’m certain you will appreciate that eliminating the cost of case-by-case examinations by health and education professionals ends up looking pretty good on your government’s bottom line.

This is good news for you and for America. The $436 a month that we will be saving by ending assistance to your child may not seem like much, but every bit counts. When you add it all up, the cuts we are making in the SSI program will save taxpayers almost $500 million a year. To put matters in perspective, that will pay for the manufacture and maintenance of almost one-sixth of a B-2 bomber.

Think about it. Your child, now declared fully able, will grow up productive and secure in an America protected by B-2 stealth bombers that can penetrate radar in the former Soviet Union and destroy the Russians with our nuclear bombs after they launch all-out nuclear war against us. And with the money we have saved cutting the budget, we will be able to build nine more B-2s, at $3 billion each, to give us an even 30.

To tell the truth, I don’t really want more B-2s, nor does my Air Force, and even the Senate is resisting. We can’t find anything to do with the ones we have. But the House of Representatives wants them, and if B2s end up in the overall military budget, I’ll sign it anyway to prove that I can get along with Republicans. Heck, I can understand--they’re built in Newt Gingrich’s state. I’ve learned to appreciate Gingrich; after all, he’s the one that got me to do the welfare reform that is saving us all that money we would otherwise be wasting on your kid.

When Newt first sounded the alarm that your kid was being misclassified by bleeding-heart health professionals, I didn’t believe him. Even the audit by my Social Security Administration came up with no evidence of fraud and concluded that your kid’s needs were real. But a good president learns and grows in the job with each election.

What I have learned is that this great crusade of ours to hold government accountable and end the waste of taxpayer dollars does not ride on the stealthy wings of fancy $3-billion planes with no place to go. No indeed, as my hero Franklin Roosevelt once said, the sacrifice must be closer to home. To the ordinary, decent people trying desperately to make ends meet, to whom I write today, I say you are losing a check but gaining a country.

Having been born poor, I can understand the financial burden of raising a child in difficult circumstances. But as the first president of this great country born in Hope, I know that the best thing I can do for the neediest of our citizens is to deny their need.

Thank you, and God bless America.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. E-mail: [email protected]