Charlie was born in Scotland. At the age of 26 he emigrated to America and opened an auto parts store in Boston. Through hard work and savvy business acumen his business thrived. Forty years later his store covered half a square block with twenty employees, all of whom were well paid, with full medical coverage and a good pension plan. Profits were good and the future looked bright.

His son, Shawn, recently graduated from Harvard with an MBA, started working in the store, with ambition to assume management duties some day. Little did he realize how soon that day would come. Charlie died suddenly from a heart attack and the full management burden fell on Shawn.

Taking a cue from his Harvard studies, Shawn opted for higher profits through the new "super free market" concept. The doors to the store was now open 24 hours a day, customers selected their needs from open shelves, and were expected to pay for them by depositing their money in an automated cashier machine.

The key, of course, was to cut overhead to the bone by adopting the new national pastime, "downsizing" the number of employees. So he cut the payroll in half, no sales clerks, no cashier just enough people to re-order and re-stock the shelves as necessary. Everything was computer automated.

It didn't take long before Shawn had a cash flow problem - not enough money coming in to pay for shipments to re-stock the emptied shelves. It seems many customers didn't pay. Profits plunged. Relying again on his Harvard MBA, he came up with another plan - downsize even more! So he called his ten employees to his office and said "Due to market pressure, I must cut payroll in half, so five of you will be terminated. The remaining employees will take a 10% pay cut, your pension premiums will be doubled and your medical coverage will be canceled."

WHAT a lousy way to run a store ---and a country!

But that's just the way our country is being run - without paying for it. Our so called President and Congress call it free trade.

As a result the United States is now paying out $180 billion a year to other countries. That's the difference between the goods we buy from them and the goods we sell to them. It's called a "trade deficit" - something free traders don't wish to talk about even if they understood it - which they obviously don't. Naturally, that creates a cash-flow problem - a sure fire road to bankruptcy.

So their idea of preventing Medicare and Social Security from going belly up is to downsize, raise premiums and cancel some benefits which elderly folks had counted on all their working years. And baby-boomers are told not to count on it.

It never dawned on these geniuses from Harvard, et al, that the open door policy of free market never worked in all history. Thats the only way to avoid bankruptcy is to be sure everone who partakes of our economic goodies (uh, our market) must pay for it, in the form of taxes or tariffs at the door, to cover cost of running our store (uh, our country). Which is what our nation did in it's first 125 years when tariffs on imports covered up to 85% of all federal revenue - whereas now it covers less than 2% even though imports are up 6,000% since JFK dreamt of Camelot.

Why then should senior citizens and baby-boomers be sacrificed to offset tax revenue forfeited to Communist China, Japan, Mexico, etc., who share in our economic jackpot without anteing up?

So, when are senior citizens and baby-boomers going to wake up long enough from their apathy to say, "Enough already - before you (Uncle Sap) start cutting our hard - earned benefits, you had better put a cashier at the door, and start charging foreigners for sharing in our market, especially those U. S. corporations who ran away to other countries in order to evade our laws so as to reap higher profits and executive bonuses for themselves."

This year our trade deficits are causing the forfeiture of $360 billion in lost tax revenues, including $70 billion in Social Security and Medicare FICA payroll taxes - an annual rate high enough to fund those programs as far as the eye can see.

I'll explain it all in detail. You see, I am a student of Art Buchwald, my favorite economist, who once wrote, "What we need to do is import Japanese students. Enroll them in Harvard to study economics and then send them back to Japan so they can screw up Japan just like they've screwed up America.