With politicians, we must constantly be alert to what has been described as the root of all evil – money. This is especially true in the months preceding elections when our representatives finally throw us a few bones in hopes we will re-elect them.

Henry Paulson, the newly appointed Secretary of the Treasury, is doing his best to hold down the national debt until November. He’s just borrowing enough to pay off securities maturing at the rate of several billion a day and keep the debt relatively even. And it doesn’t much matter that the debt currently stands at $8.4 trillion and has gone up $512 billion this fiscal year or that some of the media nitwits are already referring to this as our “$9 trillion” unfunded obligation. If Paulson can hold down borrowing in the next three months, politicians will then begin bragging about it. We are supposed to be grateful for the restraint even though we know borrowing additional new money from China, Japan, India, and others will return immediately after the midterm elections, no matter who’s elected.

Not having the usual sixty to one hundred billion per month in additional borrowed money puts a serious strain on a government spending billions on the Iraq mess where we shouldn’t be in the first place and are about to open another front; a dollar falling in value worldwide; a balance of trade deficit that will top last year’s $804.9 billion record; a job situation that’s back to 2004 levels, and a population with a negative savings rate we haven’t seen since 1933, a year after the banks closed during the Great Depression.

At this time, Congress and the administration don’t dare raise income taxes to support their military adventures, so that leaves only borrowing and cutting discretionary programs already budgeted. With borrowing on hold, and not much more they can cut from social programs in an election year, it has left politicians scurrying everywhere for money and selling off pieces of the country under their control. Lately, federal toll roads, bridges, ports; and even Alaskan oil drilling rights have been on the chopping block for sale to foreign countries.

On top of that, one of the primary reasons for “comprehensive immigration reform” that include various forms of amnesty for millions of “illegals” is the potential revenue these lawbreakers represent.

Enrolled as citizens, fined, made to pay income taxes, even back taxes, as well as being forced to contribute payroll taxes like everyone else, takes these illegals out of the darkness of under the table “cash” menial jobs like picking produce, mowing lawns, and cleaning. It upgrades millions of them to more lucrative positions and away from jobs “Americans won’t do” thereby producing even more revenue for the government to enjoy.

Politicians think that most of these illegals want to pursue the American dream and will not notice that this traps them like everyone else in the same tax burdens and benefit payments that have driven companies to outsourcing and leaving the country to tap the same cheap labor pools elsewhere.

At least, the illegals may not notice until it’s too late. They may fall in line with the same “dumbing of America” that leads so many to believe the government or Federal Reserve can just “print more money” or that inflation isn’t already happening when what’s really going on is the printing of counterfeit Treasury securities.

How else do you explain the government’s lack of immigration law enforcement? After September 11, 2001, five years ago, doing little about immigration security makes George W. Bush’s enduring “war on terror” look like a trumped up joke. If the government doesn’t believe in it, why should you?

Leaving our borders, ports, and coastlines wide open to illegal migration continues to supply everyone from big business to individual households with a form of cheap labor that wouldn’t be found in the normal taxpaying citizenry.

What’s more, if limited immigration enforcement can at least make these millions of “illegals” contribute payroll taxes it will increase things like the $86.5 billion in Social Security overpayments received last year, fiscal 2005, booty that the politicians steal and admittedly spend on invasions and the military Empire. The general public and watchdogs continue to ignore this aspect of the nation’s debt.

The bogus Social Security trust fund, which exists only as a way to make the taxpaying public replace this “borrowed” or “invested” money plus interest, now stands at more than twenty-three percent of the national debt or $1.8 trillion. It’s the greatest economic scam the world has ever seen and the crooks are looking for ways to expand it.