March 18, 2005
How to save social security
When social security is privatized I’m finally going to finally get the chance invest in my own future. I’ve been doing some research, and I think I’ve found a great opportunity in the Time Travel Fund.
The idea is simple. You pay ten dollars into the fund to add your name to the database. Then you instruct the executors of your will to report the exact time of your death to the fund managers (the site includes directions on how to handle this). That's it -- just frame your stock certificate and wait to die. Your original investment will grow exponentially thanks to the miracle of compound interest. Centuries from now, when time travel is finally possible, the fund managers will fire-up the time-machines and come back to rescue you in the moments before your death.
Here’s the thing: we can also use the fund to save social security. Just change the date of the trip from "moments before death" to age sixty-five, and institute a one-time flat social security tax of $20 dollars. Mere days after the legislation is enacted the elderly will start vanishing as our heirs take the money we've invested, build massive, multi-seat, time-machines, and come to retire them forward. Sure, the future will be disorienting for the elderly at first, but they'd be disoriented if they were back here, so it's not a huge issue. Plus, our fund managers will care for them. And since humanity will have abolished want from the world by then they'll be looking for a hobby.
"Where will they all go?" you ask. Compound interest to the rescue again! Once the elderly have started to vanish we'll establish a terra-forming fund – say at five dollars per person – so our heirs can make uninhabitable planets habitable. It shouldn't take long to develop the technology, just stick a bunch of scientists in a lab and let them run their experiments and rewind time until they get it right. Within just a few hours the galaxy will be filled with planets just like earth. Or better yet, Florida; a whole galaxy of tropical cosmic peninsulas.
When the elderly have gone to the future the incidental savings in health-care alone will be enough to institute another tax cut. Everyone will get $300 dollars back, and we'll have enough left over to invest another twenty-bucks into in a fund earmarked for building large homes on distant planets. People in this century who can't make ends meet will be able to go to the future and find work building those distant intergalactic suburbs. They'll have the same standard of living we do-it will just be in the future, and far away from the sun. We can send terminally ill people there too, while we're at it.
The fewer poor, elderly, and sick people we have this century, the greater the savings we'll be able to pass along to the future to invest in other projects: sex-bots, leisure resorts, missile defense shields. Ultimately, we might decide to move entire nations to the future where they will have the benefit of hindsight to work out their differences.
There's only one problem. What if some terrible calamity wipes us out before we've had a chance to reap our economic reward? To this I can only suggest we accept the miracle of compound interest for what it is – a miracle. And what better way to honor the God who designed that miracle than take our loved ones and physically invest them in the future? Your mother will fuss about it on the night of her sixty-fifth birthday, but when she's sitting on a sandy beach under an alien moon playing pinochle with her now elderly great-granddaughters it will be just like she's in heaven. She'll thank you for scrapping social security then; heck, you'll be there too, you can thank yourself. I know I did.
