Dogwoods and Two Grand Lies

The dogwoods are blooming along the edge of the great lawn, dark pink and brilliant white. Below the hill, Brush Creek runs slow and clear past the parkway that shares its name. Beyond, Spanish mission buildings catch the morning sun.

Saturday in April.

The collie comes loping back up the slope. She drops the ball at his feet and barks and backs up, ready.

“What’s her name?”

The girl from the diner stands at the edge of the grass in a light sweater, holding two coffees. She hands him one.

“Penny.”

“You said you bring her out here on weekends.” She sits down on the grass. “So I figured Saturday.”

He throws the ball. Penny goes.

She has brought a stack of index cards, rubber-banded, thick as a fist. Names of bones on one side, in her small neat writing.

“You mentioned school.” he says. “What classes are you taking?”

“Medical school. UMKC.”

He looks at her. “Medical school?”

“It’s a six-year program. High school straight in. No college in between.” She turns a coffee cup in her hands, keeping them warm. “They gave me a patient the first month. Mostly I just took his blood pressure and listened to him talk about Korea.”

“So what’s the diner?”

“Tuition.”

“What about you?”

“Business school. Rockhurst.” He throws the ball again. “Nights and weekends at my uncle’s shop. Tool and die.”

“What’s a die?”

“A tool that makes the same part every time, until they eventually wear out.”

She does not look at the cards once.

They stay until the coffee is gone and then longer. Her hair is up and she smells somehow better than the dogwoods. When she leaves she touches his arm.

He has a four o’clock shift at his uncle’s shop.

Act I. The Match

North Kansas City. A machine shop a block off the tracks. Hydraulic presses shook the concrete. Screw machines never seemed to stop. Over the tool bay radio, “Show Me the Way” played for what felt like the hundredth time while his uncle studied another purchase agreement. The new Cincinnati machining center had arrived in July. Five years of payments sat beside it.

The shop makes tooling for the overhaul base at the airport. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. TWA is the main customer, and they order more every year. The uncle takes the orders.

His brother has a desk by the window. Eight years older, married, Missouri Air Guard airlift mechanic. His unit gets called up in December to what his brother calls “the sandbox.” His uniforms still in the office closet because no one believed he’d be gone long.

By now he’s twenty. Still in business school across town, nights and weekends in the shop. With his brother deployed, the nights get longer. The uncle might be the boss on paper, but his brother ran the place.

In February, his mother calls the office phone. He yells into the phone, a finger in his other ear. A truck rolled on a road north of the border. His brother is alive. His back is broken in two places.

The shop fires up again Monday morning.

He signs payroll checks for the first time in March. He copies the way his brother wrote them in the green ledger. Six cents and change of every guy’s check comes out of every dollar for Social Security. The shop puts in the same amount.

A match.

It seems plain enough. The men put in their share, the shop puts in. Someday the government pays it back.

Both halves go to the bank in one deposit and then to the government every quarter.

He looks for something that says what the money buys. There isn’t one. Just a booklet of tax tables instead.

He changes his schedule to night classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays at six. In April a shipment comes back out of tolerance, a die is worn and no one measured it. The rework takes the nights for three weeks. He makes it to one final. Sleeps through the other. In the fall he signs up for two classes and drops one.

She calls the shop on Sundays now. He’s there catching up on paperwork when the machines are down. She is on rotations now. They meet at the lawn on Saturdays when she is off and he can get away. Penny is glad to see her.

His brother comes home in June with a cane. The cane is not going away. Some mornings he is at the shop, others he doesn’t make it. The uncle drinks his coffee on the floor and tells him. Your brother needs time. When he is right you go back to days.

A year later the shop takes on two more men for the TWA work. He is twenty-one. He runs payroll again, eighteen checks and the deposit. In early July he sends the government the largest check he has ever signed. Half came out of the men’s pay. Half from the shop.

Act II. The Stub

Match Day comes on a Thursday in March. Six years of school for one envelope, opened in a hotel ballroom with everyone else.

The envelope isn’t an invitation. It’s orders. Hers says Houston.

He drives her to the airport in June. Penny rides in the back with her head out the window. At the curb she holds the dog’s face in both hands for a while, and then his, and then she goes. The Tercel gets sold to a cousin. Everything else fits in two bags.

The years in Houston are call nights and loan payments. A hundred hours some weeks. She sleeps in the hospital more than the apartment.

The first paycheck comes at the end of July. She reads the stub in the parking garage, line by line.

Federal. State. FICA. She asks the chief resident what FICA is.

“Social Security,” he says. “Everybody pays it.” She does not read another stub.

Her mother mails the Kansas City paper now and then. The airline is in it twice, and then again, and she calls the shop on a Sunday.

“It is quieter here than it used to be,” he says.

He does not say more and she does not ask.

They trade cards at Christmas.

In her fourth year, a boy comes in at two in the morning with a burst appendix. Before she takes him back, his mother asks what it will cost. Not whether he will live. What it will cost.

She says she doesn’t know, and it’s the stone cold truth. The boy does fine. She never sees a copy of the bill and has no idea how much it costs.

She stays two more years after residency to learn children’s surgery. She is thirty-one, and for the first time in her life there’s nothing she wants more.

That fall, an envelope comes from the Social Security Administration. She’s curious.

Inside is every year she has ever worked and what she earned. She didn’t know someone knew all the history. The diner is there at the top of the list even though she earned nearly nothing. Eleven hundred dollars.

Below it is a number for what she will receive at sixty-seven.

At the bottom, a paragraph says Congress can change the law at any time, and that by the time she retires, the taxes coming in will cover about three-quarters of what the program has promised to pay.

She reads it. She reads it again. Puts it in the envelope where she keeps seven years of paper copies of her taxes.

Children’s Mercy calls that spring to offer her a children’s surgeon position.

She comes home.

The dogwoods are blooming when she signs.

Act III. The Letters

The uncle signs the shop over to him in ninety-eight. He keeps a key and his coffee mug and comes in on Tuesdays to stand on the floor. His brother signs as the witness.

A competitor buys the airline in the spring. They have overhaul shops and suppliers of their own in other states. Orders come in slower all summer and stop in October.

Twenty years of tooling sit on the racks in the back. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. All of it built to print, property of the airline. Good tool steel, and none of it his.

He calls three numbers before someone on the other end of the line knows anything. “Scrap it or store it,” the man says. “Nobody is coming for it.”

The accountant doesn’t sugarcoat it. He can keep what he has in savings, or he can pay the guys their last payrolls.

He tells the men after the final shift, when the checks are ready. Fifteen men shake his hand. One doesn’t.

“Should’ve told us months ago, so we could have found another shop.”

The men get paid.

He takes the deposit to the bank; the men’s share and the shop’s match both. Then, an auction one day in March. The Cincinnati sells to a shop in Wichita.

He keeps the green ledger. Her Christmas cards are tucked inside the back cover.

The years go by at Children’s Mercy. Operation by operation. She gets good, and then she gets known. Residents ask to train under her.

She tells them never to call an operation routine where a family can hear it.

When the hospital raises money for the new tower, she gives enough that they ask about putting her name on something. She says no.

The fund she starts pays the bills insurance will not for the families who have to ask what it costs.

The auction is in the paper that spring, two lines. She reads them. At Christmas she signs the card the same as every year.

The uncle dies in November. A widower. No children.

He handles the arrangements and calls the number on the government website. The check that came that month has to go back, the woman on the phone tells him.

There is a death payment of two hundred fifty-five dollars, for a spouse or a child. He has neither.

“Then there is no payment,” she says. She is polite.

He thanks her before he hangs up.

At the funeral his brother reads the eulogy leaning on the cane. The page begins to shake. He steps beside him and holds the bottom corner.

The paper statements stop coming. A card in the mail says they are online now.

She creates an account and types a password twice.

There it is. A record of every year. Even the diner. Eleven hundred dollars.

The paragraph at the bottom is still there. The year beside it is closer.

She reads it once. She prints it and files it with the taxes. In the back of the drawer are cards children made for her after their surgery.

He gets a job fixing machines at other shops. First, at twelve dollars an hour, then eighteen, then twenty-six.

He gets a small house north of the river with a fenced yard. Penny lives long enough to see the yard. He buries her under the maple the next winter. He waits a year before bringing home another collie, and when her time came, one more. The yard is big enough for them to chase the ball.

He gets laid off and files for Social Security. He is sixty-two. Deposits come once a month.

At sixty-five a letter comes about Medicare.

Because of what she earns, her premium for the same coverage will run several times what most people pay.

Same card. Same doctors. She reads it. She reads it again.

The same week she sends her annual check to the fund at Children’s Mercy.

The year he is sixty-five, a letter comes from the Social Security Administration.

The trust fund is empty.

Starting in January, the checks will be smaller. About twenty percent smaller.

The law allows Congress to act at any time, the letter says. Congress has not.

He sells the house with the yard in the spring.

Moves into an apartment. Third floor. Rent set by his income.

There is no yard.

The park is a ten-minute drive. Some weeks they go twice. Some weeks they don’t.

The collie is old now. She brings him the ball anyway. She chews it and drops it at his feet and backs away, ready.

He rubs pain away on the side of his knee.

Then he throws it.

Postscript

Thanks for choosing to spend time with me.

Dogwoods and two grand lies. Bookends.

At the start, they fall in love on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. April, when the dogwoods bloom brilliant white and dark pink. The Missouri state tree.

What look like dogwood petals are really modified leaves. The flowers are the small cluster at the center. The wood is hard. Close-grained. Used for tools and machine parts. Beautiful from a distance. Hard enough for tool work.

Now the other bookend. The two lies.

The first grand lie: We can change the terms for successful people without betraying them because we believe they can afford it. Tax the rich.

We tell ourselves this group doesn’t need Social Security. They must already have enough money.

But we also say Social Security isn’t an investment. It’s societal insurance. We buy it so the elderly can live above the poverty line and those injured, disabled, or otherwise unable to work can survive.

It works. Social Security keeps millions of Americans above the poverty line.

A short, rich man in Jericho once stood up at dinner and gave half of everything he had to the poor. Nobody voted. What he gave freely was evidence of his character.

What we are arguing about is different. Not what she gives, which is her business and enormous, but what we can force her to give.

Generosity is one question. Honest scales, weights, and measures are another.

So let’s ask: Social Security is social insurance tied to wages and not a general income tax. Should there be some relationship between what is insured, what is taxed, and what is paid out?

Our debate today is really about that principle.

Some argue that Social Security should transfer from the wealthy to the poor. They ask very high earners to finance more of the system, even if they receive little or no additional benefit.

Others argue that doing so changes the point of the program. They posit what is supposed to be social insurance should be income-transfer.

Maybe ability to pay is reason enough. But then we should say plainly what we are doing. Choosing one promise over another. Not keeping both.

The second grand lie: We can reduce benefits for unsuccessful or unlucky people without betraying them because that is what the math says.

Truth. Congress can change benefits at any time. Roosevelt insisted on payroll contributions because they gave workers a moral and political claim to their benefits and made the program nearly impossible to scrap.

And he addressed reality. Before Social Security, the poorhouse was real. It even had an address. Today Social Security lifts millions of Americans above the poverty line. In a small apartment, that means heat, groceries, and rent.

We will probably have to break faith with at least one of these groups. Someone will pay more than the agreed terms or receive less than the terms we promised.

Let’s thank them with a gracious heart and not pretend they owed it or deserved it all along.

And before we levy judgment on either group, let’s remember that none of us are good. We are not to judge between goats and rams.

So. Let’s pull out our Social Security Statements and ask what they actually promise, who made that promise, and whether anyone ever had the authority to make it.

And let’s stop believing there is someone else who can be made to pay the bill.

Sources

History and law

Luther Gulick, “Memorandum on Conference with FDR Concerning Social Security Taxation, Summer 1941.” Social Security Administration, Historian’s Office, Research Note No. 23. Gulick’s memorandum records Roosevelt’s argument that payroll contributions would give workers a legal, moral, and political claim to benefits and make the program politically difficult to repeal.

Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960). The Supreme Court held that paying Social Security taxes does not create an accrued contractual right to a fixed or unalterable benefit. Congress retained authority to revise eligibility and benefit provisions.

Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937). The Supreme Court upheld the old-age provisions of the Social Security Act under Congress’s taxing-and-spending power and its authority to provide for the general welfare.

Social Security Administration, “Historical Background and Development of Social Security.” A history of poor relief, almshouses, poorhouses, poor farms, old-age dependency, and the conditions preceding the 1935 Social Security Act.

Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 3 (2010). A history of the program and the tension between individual equity (what contributors believe they earned) and social adequacy (what society believes beneficiaries need.)

Program rules and documents

Social Security Administration, The 2026 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees.The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund is projected to pay full scheduled benefits until the fourth quarter of 2032. After depletion, continuing income would cover approximately 78 percent of scheduled benefits.

Social Security Administration, A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports. A shorter presentation of the retirement, disability, and combined-fund projections.

Social Security Administration, “The History and Development of the Lump-Sum Death Benefit.” Congress established the $255 maximum lump-sum death payment in the 1954 amendments.

Social Security Administration, “Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The current eligibility rules for the $255 payment to a qualifying surviving spouse or eligible child.

20 C.F.R. § 404.390, “Amount of the Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The federal regulation governing the amount of the payment.

Social Security Act § 202(i). The statutory basis for the lump-sum death payment.

Social Security Administration, “What to Do When Someone Dies.” SSA pays retirement benefits one month behind and pays no benefit for the month of death. A payment made for that month or a later month must be returned.

Barbara A. Smith and Kenneth A. Couch, “The Social Security Statement: Background, Implementation, and Recent Developments.” Social Security Bulletin 74, no. 2 (2014). Documents nationwide paper mailings, their suspension in 2011, the online Statement introduced in 2012, and changes in Statement language and distribution.

Social Security Administration, “Your Social Security Statement.” The current source for accessing, reviewing, and printing a personal Statement.

Social Security Administration, “Social Security and Medicare Tax Rates.” Beginning in 1990, employees and employers each paid 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare.

Internal Revenue Service, Publication 15: Employer’s Tax Guide. The employer guide to withholding, depositing, reporting, and paying payroll taxes.

Social Security Administration, “Medicare Premiums: Rules for Higher-Income Beneficiaries.” Higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay income-related adjustments for Part B and Part D.

Poverty and the program’s effect

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.” The analysis estimates that Social Security lifts approximately 16.9 million people age sixty-five and older above the official poverty line.

Medicine and education

University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “B.A./M.D. Program.” UMKC accepts students directly from high school into an accelerated program in which the B.A. and M.D. can be completed in six years.

University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “Learning in Docent Teams.” Students begin clinical experiences early through UMKC’s docent system.

National Resident Matching Program, “Requesting a Waiver or Deferral.” A Match creates a binding commitment between the applicant and the residency program unless the NRMP grants a waiver or deferral.

National Resident Matching Program, “How the Matching Algorithm Works.” An explanation of how applicants and residency programs are paired.

Children’s Mercy Kansas City. Institutional background for the pediatric hospital and the fictional surgeon’s later career.

Rockhurst University, College of Business, Influence, and Information Analysis.Institutional background for his business studies.

Kansas City, TWA, and period setting

American Airlines, Annual Report on Form 10-K. American Airlines, through a subsidiary, purchased substantially all of TWA’s assets and assumed certain liabilities on April 9, 2001.

Kansas City International Airport, “Airport History.” Background on TWA’s historical presence and overhaul operations in Kansas City.

Dennis DeYoung, “Show Me the Way,” performed by Styx on Edge of the Century, 1990. Contemporary reporting on its Gulf War association. The song became associated with Gulf War requests and dedications during early 1991.

Dogwoods

Missouri Secretary of State, “Missouri State Tree.” The flowering dogwood became Missouri’s official state tree in 1955.

Missouri Botanical Garden, Cornus florida. The small central cluster contains the true flowers. The conspicuous white or pink structures are modified leaves called bracts.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, “Cornus florida—Flowering Dogwood.” Flowering dogwood wood is hard, strong, heavy, fine-grained, and shock-resistant. Historical uses include tool handles, mauls, pulleys, shuttles, and other working objects.

Scripture

Luke 19:1–10, King James. Zacchaeus gives half of his goods to the poor.

Matthew 22:15–22, King James. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Leviticus 19:35–36, King James. The command to use just balances, just weights, and honest measures.

Ezekiel 34, King James. The Almighty will judge.

Further reading

Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946. Perkins’s account of Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the formation of Social Security.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. The first published appearance of Roosevelt’s payroll-tax remarks based on Gulick’s account.

Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” The single source for a listener who wants a deeper explanation of the program’s competing principles.

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