No, wait. It's not the final report. It's just a draft of the possible final report. A rough draft put together by the grunts and not yet approved by the full fourteen member bipartisan board.

We are warned not to quote from this 140-page draft, leak, or whatever you want to call it, that seems to serve no purpose other than to give us something in our Christmas stocking as promised. Here are your marshmallows, but don't eat them.

Diligently working away on what they see as Social Security's many problems and specifically commissioned to develop a method of allowing young McDonald's employees to invest part of their payroll taxes in the stock market, the commission seems almost ready to make its recommendations. The main finding being that we should plunge forward tentatively.

The commission recommends that everyone take another year to argue all the pros and cons of what to do. Take the bull by the horns and hold on for another year or so, at least until after the next elections. What's a little more dust and dirt in your face when we've got terrorists to worry about, both at home and abroad?

What is now, was then, and ever shall be the easiest problem to solve seems to completely elude the greatest brains in our collection of politicians, bureaucrats and their loyal appointees—stop stealing the money.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to find that a commission established to make at least one small step in the right direction completely misses the point and is now bogged down in trivia. After all, the name of the game is to stall. Talk about reform while really doing as little as possible. Make a lot of noise. Tell everyone that you are deeply concerned about doing the right thing while avoiding any positive change whatsoever. Keep the subject on the back burner. Don't give up the ship. And for God's sake, don't mention the booty.

Last year, fiscal 2001 that ended last September 30th, the Beltway Bandits made off with $98.7 billion from Social Security alone. Add in the other entitlements robbed, and the total jumps to $160.7 billion. That's not chicken feed.

And it certainly helps when the government ran a deficit in its normal "on budget" spending. Going over budget by $33.5 billion left the government with a mere surplus of $127.2 billion ($160.7 minus $33.5 billion). The second largest surplus in US history.

After telling us that they wouldn't touch Social Security funds for anything but paying down the national debt, it turns out that they only threw $66 billion against one side of the debt in their Marc Rich laundry operation and overall the national debt rose $133.3 billion in fiscal 2001.

Just weeks before September 11th and the New War on Terrorism, the federal government was in deep doo-doo. The scam was coming unraveled.

On June 19th, in a luncheon speech to the Coalition for American Financial Security at the New World Trade Center of all places, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill chose to tell the truth about the Social Security Trust Fund. He announced to the country what everyone should have known all along anyway since the fund was already 20 percent of the national debt. He told us there was no money in the trust. It held nothing but debt.

In other words, our politicians and previous administrations had been lying to us. Building this fund to extend the life of the supplemental retirement system was simply another falsehood in their arsenal of propaganda. What had been a major element in the rip-off of the American worker's retirement money was now gone.

Newspapers and the media, having little else to talk about except Gary Condit and the strange disappearance of Chandra Levy, were suddenly putting Social Security on the front burner and editorials were starting to probe real questions instead of political garbage.

Economists and budget pundits thrust to the front lines were all telling us the same story. If and when Social Security must turn to its trust fund, the government would be faced with "tough decisions" to either (1) raise taxes, (2) borrow from the public, or (3) cut benefits. This was uniformly seen as the only way to come up with the enormous amounts of money needed to redeem the bogus junk bonds that had been deposited in the debit black hole trust fund accounts under the pretense of "borrowing."

Not thoroughly explained yet, it was becoming obvious that this mantra was nothing more than the government's normal way of raising revenue whether there were trust funds or not. And those entitlement trust funds, all of them, were of value to no one but politicians and bureaucrats. The Social Security Trust Fund has absolutely no value to the American workers who have been contributing surpluses for years. Extra cash that Social Security didn't need, the government spent elsewhere, and was now accounted for by a debit ledger that had the workers at least 130 percent in the hole.

Even the nitwits who think that a volatile stock market is a dangerous place to invest Social Security's excessive profits might, by now, have realized that nothing could be worse than going about 130 percent in the hole.

Given a little more time, the American workers and the mathematically challenged Fourth Estate might have understood the full "Pay-It-Again, Sam" scam, the double taxation involved with entitlement surpluses. We give them money, and they give us debt in return—with interest added in the form of more debt.

If the working public fully understood that they would be better off throwing their extra payroll tax payments in the ocean, instead of giving them to the government, American workers might have formed their own Northern Alliance.

But alas, the Ossama bin Laden's horrendous attack on world banking and the Pentagon took care of that possibility. Social Security reform is now buried in the rubble of what we are told will be a long drawn out war on evil-doers (other evil-doers). And the Beltway Bandits can go back to business as usual and the American public will probably re-elect them all.