Mathematics is important. If you study math in school, you can be a physicist, an engineer, an accountant, maybe even a conservative.

How can math help you be a conservative?

Well, this is how I explained to my friend Billy, a freckle-faced all-American boy who had just come back from fishin' in the creek when I caught him by the earlobe and sat him down on the curb.

Here's what I told the little moppet.

Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its figures on the number of children on food stamps.

One in five children in America eat because of food stamps. They call it something else now, but it's food stamps. Eight million were living only with their moms. Five million were living with married parents.

If you want to cut that program, you have to know math, I told little Billy.

First of all, cut those eight million kids who don't have a father around. They are bastards, most likely, and their mothers are whores.

The other five million?

Well, a fair amount of them are negroes who wouldn't bother to eat at all if they didn't need the strength to go rioting every time some redneck cop shoots one of 'em. They start young, too.

And a good number of them are Mexicans, probably illegal. They come here to get food stamps and steal all our good jobs down at the carwash. Why, if it wasn't for the damn illegals, I could have a real American cutting my lawn for $2 an hour.

The rest of them are hillbilly dumbasses, people who'd eat possum for breakfast if there were no Wal-Mart. If you give a damn about nutrition in the trailer park, you're a communist.

So, by applying conservative mathematics to the problem, you can see that none of these kids deserve even a mouthful of the lobster and steak their parents buy with their food stamps.

The trick to conservative math is that it's not simply adding and subtracting boring old numbers. It's adding rhetoric and slurs to the numbers and then subtracting PEOPLE.

As the old song says, "Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'" and that's a certain truth, like the resurrection of Jesus, who once fed free fish to a stadium full of worthless poor people.

Little Billy was quite entranced. You can teach kids anything if you start by teaching them to look down on other people.

We'd been talking for quite a while, sitting there on the curb with Billy smiling up at me.

"I'm hungry, Mr. Dion," he said to me in a voice cuter than a speckled puppy under a red wagon.

"Does your daddy live with you?" I asked.

"No," Billy said. "It's just me and my mom."

"Sorry, kid," I said. "Wrong number."

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated column, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America" is available for Nook and Kindle.