When I was a kid, I remember seeing a magician at my grade school.

He did all these cool tricks, like make stuff disappear and all that other stuff that looks absolutely amazing when you’re eight years old.

Later in life, I watched a magician perform a similar act.

But by now I was fourteen and had figured out how the magician pulled off every stunt:misdirection with her hands, pre-fabricated gadgets, smoke and mirrors-type stuff. I was less than impressed.

That memory stays with me today. And I have come to realize that some of the greatest magicians in the world aren’t to be found in carnivals or at grade school assemblies.

They’re in Washington. They’re in the offices of large multi-national corporations. They are the purveyors of the Great American Myths.

One of these Great American Myths is the assertion that the greatest threat to the economic security of our nation is all of the lazy slackers who collect welfare while the rest of us hard-working laborers are stuck footing the bill.

I have encountered people who fit this description in my lifetime.

I knew a guy when I was growing up who was a single dad with two kids. I had no idea where the mother was. The son had some medical problem with his hip. The father was a lazy sack of crap who had no job and collected welfare checks, despite the fact that he spent most of his day watching HBO and Cinemax.

Everyone probably knows someone like this or has heard similar stories. Incidents like this are often cited as the reason why welfare is evil.

And, when faced with a case like this, who can argue?

What is never brought up is the fact that the majority of the welfare-receiving population are children, not lazy, twenty-five year-old jobless, crack-using bar-sluts who have babies to get more money from the government, as many would lead you to believe.

Why isn’t this brought up more? Because when you’re performing a great magic trick, you’ve got to deflect the attention of your audience to somewhere meaningless, a place where you’re still in full view, but they can’t see what’s really going on.

It’s like Capitol Hill and corporate America are full of Verbals from the Usual Suspects, focusing our attention in one area that leads to a logical conclusion so apparent that the truth is never uncovered.

Until it’s too late.

The prevalent myth that illegal immigrants and welfare recipients are the primary cause of America’s economic deterioration is a lie.

Someone is sponging off of the hard work of the American middle and lower classes, but it’s not little kids and young mothers with WIC checks. Set your sights a little higher.

Newsweek did a story a few months ago on the condition of the American worker in corporate America, and there you will find the source of America’s economic woes.

Edward Brennen is the former CEO of Sears. He laid off 50,000 workers. He made $3 million a year.

Robert Allen is the CEO at AT&T. He makes $3.3 million a year. He laid off 40,000 workers.

Robert Stempel, the former CEO of General Motors, laid off 74,000 employees. He rakes in a cool million.

And Louis Gertner, the CEO at IBM? Laid off 60,000 employees, and pulls in $2.6 million a year.

For those bad at math (like me), that adds up to 224,000 employees whose jobs were liquidated.

Any good businessman will tell you these jobs were eliminated most likely because the companies couldn’t afford that many workers anymore. They needed to “tighten their belts.”

Yet four men, four men, at these companies made a combined $9.9 million per year.

Yesterday morning, newspapers reported the great financial merger of Bell Atlantic and Nynex, which will create a multi-billion dollar communication company. Their combined revenue in 1995? $26.8 billion.

And yet, analysts predict between 1,000 and 3,000 workers will lose their jobs as a result of this merger.

Newt Gingrich or Limbaugh’s dittoheads would argue that this just isn’t true, it’s just not happening, because, after all, “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled… was convincing everyone that he didn’t exist.”

For as much as it has become fashionable to blame the poor for sucking the life out of America’s economy, you’d think welfare recipients would be rolling in dough.

So how come the wealthiest one percent of the U.S. controls 40 percent of the nation’s wealth?

The old saying of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is quickly becoming reality, as the disparity between the rich and the poor continues to grow and the middle class disappears.

You’d think if the recipients of these social programs are so destructive and are so effective at sucking away the rest of the nation’s money, they’d have a little more to show for it.

So who is the real cause of the decline of the American standard of living? You decide.

But I’d like to see someone make an argument that the leaders of corporate America are the true bastions of capitalism in this country, that welfare recipients and those sponging off of the government are destroying our great nation. And I’d like to see them do it with a straight face.

I dare you. I double-dare you. I triple-dog dare you.

Then again, perhaps I am simply a product of my environment, another member of the liberal media rattling bleeding-heart rhetoric.

“Liberal media.” Where did this phrase come from?

Was it Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, George Will or William F. Buckley who championed this misnomer?

Ah, but that is another subject for another time. For now, kids, it’s magic time. And does Uncle Newt have a heck of a trick for you…

Tim Davis is a senior in theater studies from Carlisle. He is the editor of the Opinion Page.