Irony of ironies and an act of supreme hypocrisy, one of the major charges brought against Mr. Kopper is the supposedly complicated subject of money laundering, one of the things the U.S. Government does best and in the trillions. When it comes to money laundering, the government owns the Laundromat.

It wasn't long ago that we all heard Bill Clinton and Al Gore bragging about "paying down the national debt" while that debt continued to rise year after year, albeit less than it had been rising annually since the early Eighties.

The reason for this was that our illustrious heroes were paying down one side of the national debt all right, but they were using our entitlement money to do it. In their game of pretending to borrow Social Security and other entitlement surpluses, a separate but related crime, this meant that every time they used a dollar of entitlement money to pay down the Investor side of the debt (what they call "Public Debt") they added a dollars worth of debt to the Entitlement side (what they call "Intragovernmental Holdings").

Don't let the words fool you. The words are part of the scam.

Once you add in the annual interest that's paid against the Entitlement side of the national debt, you've got an overall increase to the debt.

Somewhere prior to 1998, people like Alan Greenspeak and Robert Rubin came to the realization that, hey, we're paying annual interest to the Entitlement side without any money involved, we just hand a trust more bogus bonds, while interest to Investors must be paid with real cash. The latter was running well over two hundred billion a year and a significant chunk of the budget.

Marc Rich, the world's greatest money launderer, probably showed up about that time to point out how much cash could be saved if they simply moved debt from one side to the other. Later, his buxom ex-wife would claim the reward by getting him pardoned and work in some publicity for her song writing business as well.

In their best year, fiscal 2000, the government actually had a $237 billion surplus and they put $230 billion against the Investor side of the national debt. $150 billion came from entitlement theft ($95.4 billion from Social Security alone) that would have been a wash by adding that amount to the other side of the debt, but $80 billion came from income tax overpayments and that helped keep the overall national debt down to a mere $18 billion increase. Bill and Al were overjoyed and so proud of themselves.

The democrats are still complaining about not having as much surplus income tax money to use this way. It's what they really mean when they complain about the Bush tax cuts.

And George W. Bush bought into the scheme when he became President. Immediately after the inauguration, Greenspeak took him aside to explain the debt laundering operation and Dubya actually managed a $66 billion payment against the Investor side during his first year in office.

The long and the short of it is this:

The nation currently has $3.5 trillion in debt held by Investors that we are paying about $214 billion in annual interest.

If you had the wherewithal to pay off that $3.5 trillion entirely—you would immediately save $214 billion. Isn't that wonderful?

The government feels that it does have the wherewithal from your excess Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement contributions that do not go down much even in times of war, recession, high unemployment, and so forth. And they make no bones about using your retirement money this way.

Thus, you the taxpayer, can rest assured that the minute they stop using your retirement money for wars and get back to surpluses—you will get a direct exchange of six cents for every extra entitlement dollar you hand the government. What a deal!

The mathematically challenged Mayberry news services, people who must call their mothers to figure out how old they are, will repeatedly tell you that this sort of savings enables the government to better meet your needs in the future. Do you think they're in on the scam?