What Is the Value of a Single Human Life?

The social safety net consists of a variety of programs and policies designed to maintain the quality, integrity, and dignity of life in America….These programs and policies include, but are not limited to, the following:

Social Security, SSI, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Commonly known as welfare.),
Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, School Lunch and Breakfast, Medicaid, and Medicare….And now The Affordable Health Care Act….

Let us suppose that there is clear and convincing evidence that one of these over the course of time has saved a single life.

Let us also suppose that there is clear and convincing evidence that cutting or eliminating funding of any of these, to reduce the deficit, would result in the death of at least one individual.

What is the value of a single human life in this context?

How do we, as a society, come to the point of making such a determination?

Why should we pay a team of firefighters to enter a burning tenement to save the life of a child who the government has determined isn’t worth the cost of feeding?

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