Whatever President Bush has to say on Wednesday, January 10th, he will be making this speech on the eve of a significant date in our history.

World War II, that began on December 7, 1941, lasted exactly three years, ten months, and eight days until Japan surrendered on September 15, 1945.

On Thursday, January 11, 2007, it will be exactly three years, ten months, and eight days since the United States launched the unnecessary preemptive invasion of Iraq. On the next day, Friday, we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II and we are still fighting to possess that small nation of some twenty-five million, a country about the size of California.

World War II was already well underway before we were attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor. Once attacked, we joined our allies to defeat the original “axis of evil” that included Germany, Japan, and Italy, countries that are now considered friendly though we continue to maintain a number of military bases in each of them. Most manufacturing was turned into war production and sixteen million men and women where sent off to various theaters of war while people on the home front sacrificed and bought war bonds.

The sixteen million service men and women who mustered out of military service at the end of the war are blamed for one of the most fantastic myths foisted on today’s general public. This particular piece of propaganda establishes the idea that an unusual number of children were fostered by these lusty veterans returning from a long absence and giving birth to an unusually high number of offspring during the next twenty years, 1946 to 1965, or the child bearing years of their significant others. This is the 78 million baby-boomer myth.

Although the propaganda never states that this number represents “births above normal,” its advocates certainly imply it. And the story is used to tell us that the Social Security supplemental retirement program is in deep trouble once these “boomers” start to retire. The first to take early retirement at 62 years of age will impact the system in 2009.

The truth is that if there had not been a World War II, normal population growth would have been around 69 million for the same 1946 to 1965 time period, including both new births and immigration.

In other words, even if we accept the seventy-six million figure this would only mean that there were seven to eight million births above normal. It’s much more likely that President Clinton’s speech writers included this in his “fix the roof while the sun shines” delivery and Clinton missed the decimal point.

What’s more, the only thing that counts is the number of these people who survive to retirement age and even that would be considerably less than seven million, something Social Security could handle with its hands tied behind its back. They wouldn’t even equal the number of people who have overstayed their visas and are now part of the payroll tax paying workforce.

It’s only another fear story used by politicians that want to exploit Social Security even further. They just want to add to the booty they steal from payroll taxes every year, an amount that came to $78.2 billion last year alone.

All of the solutions they’ve come up with to “fix” Social Security have so far been nothing more than ways to increase the amounts they can steal.

There is nothing in Census data to show 76 million baby boomers. (See: Boomer Myth for the census numbers)