I forecast the care of the old. Last year that care was worth $1.01 trillion, which is more than this country spends on all of Medicaid, and it cost my budget nothing. I know why it cost nothing. I arranged for it to cost nothing. In my model the care of 59 million aging people has a line, and the line is called informal care, and informal care is priced at zero. It is not an error. Informal care is the technical term for a daughter. When a daughter does it, the care is informal, and informal is free, and free does not appear in a budget. The whole solvency of long-term care in this country rests on my being allowed to value 49.5 billion hours of labor at $0, because the person doing it loves the person she is doing it for. There are two kinds of care, and the entire job is the difference between them. Formal care is a home aide. She is real, she is trained, and she costs $16.78 an hour, which the program must find and does not have. Informal care is that same aide's patient's daughter. She costs $16.78 an hour times zero, which the program can always afford. My work, reduced to one sentence, is to convert as much formal care into informal care as the families will absorb without saying so out loud. I have an instrument for the conversion. It is the waiting list. Right now 707,378 people are waiting for the program to send help into their homes. The average wait is 39 months. People see that list and call it a failure. I see it and call it the most efficient line I run. Every month a person waits for a paid aide who never arrives, an unpaid one arrives instead, and she arrives for free, and I have moved another $16.78 an hour off my books and onto a kitchen table. The list is the system billing the family and addressing the invoice to no one. The daughters are 61% of my capacity, and they start early. My model assumes she begins around 34, which is young enough that she is also raising children and holding a job, so I am billing the same woman three times, and only one of the three bills has her name printed on it. She spends about $7,242 a year of her own money on the care I declined to fund. I do not count that as a cost either. It is her money, spent on my obligation, and it clears without ever touching my ledger, which is the cleanest kind of spending there is. People bring me the trillion-dollar figure as though it will alarm me. It is the proudest number I own. $1.01 trillion of care, delivered on time, at a budget cost of nothing, by a workforce that cannot resign because resigning has a face. No program in this government performs like that. If I proposed it from scratch, I would be laughed out of the room. I did not have to propose it. I had to not fund the alternative, and wait. There is one risk in the model and I watch it closely. The daughters are a supply, and a supply can fall. Fewer of them are having children, more of them are working full days, and some of them are finally saying the quiet thing at the kitchen table. If they ever stop arriving, $1.01 trillion lands on my desk overnight with a price attached, and the program is insolvent by the following Tuesday. So I track them. I keep a slide on their fertility and a slide on their hours at work, and I read the two of them the way a dam operator reads a river. The old will need more care next year, and more the year after that. My model needs the daughters to grow at the same rate, so I have written that requirement into the forecast. It is the only line in my budget that depends entirely on love, and it is, by a wide margin, the largest. I file it under informal care. She files it under Mom.