The Deseret News Publishing Company of Salt Lake City reports that this will allow railroad workers to retire at 60 instead of 62 and will increase benefits for surviving spouses by an average of $300 a month.

So much for the good news.

While the government stole $160.7 billion from entitlements last year, $98.7 billion from Social Security surpluses alone, all plans to defray at least part of this crime were either put on hold or abandoned entirely. The pirates will not easily give up their booty.

The plan to stimulate the economy by putting payroll taxes "on vacation" for one month, a plan endorsed by both political cults, was set aside without becoming a bill or being put to a vote. After all the talk about how this would put somewhere between $38 and $43 billion into the economy, not even half of what the bandits will pirate from Social Security during fiscal 2002, the proponents decided this was too dangerous. People might easily see that the government could get along just fine without 12.4 percent of worker's payroll for more than a month and might begin to realize just how much the government has been stealing. Kiss that idea goodbye.

A bill titled the "Straighter Talk on Social Security Act of 2001" also died. This was a bill, HR-1068, introduced in the House by Jim DeMint (R-SC) and in the Senate as S-547 by John McCain. It would have taken the word "Trust" out and substituted the word "Accounting" to any mention of the so-called Social Security Funds. Henceforth, the Social Security Trust Funds would be known as the Social Security Accounting Funds, a definition more honest and in line with what they really are. We would then have the Federal Old Age Insurance Accounting Fund and the Federal Disability Insurance Accounting Fund. Since neither of these funds hold money, positive assets, or anything but debt and demands on future income taxes, and people tend to confuse them with real trust funds, this new description would be "straighter talk."

Another bill to shuffle words was HR-219, a bill to change all nonmarketable bonds held by trusts to marketable bonds. If this bill passed, the taxpaying public could pay off marketable Treasury securities instead of paying off the nonmarketable variety. Of course, the government might be able to sell these bonds to little old ladies and others looking for a safe investment, then we could pay off the little old ladies later with interest. Public taxes pay off all Treasury securities, marketable and nonmarketable alike. Another wash that gets us nowhere.

All of these small half-hearted attempts at honesty are nothing more than further confessions and admissions to the theft of entitlement funds. Not just the American worker's retirement and health care surplus contributions, but all of the extra entitlement money stolen every year, and stolen as fast as it comes into government coffers. None of it ever goes into the "trust funds" anyway.

Of all the 152 accounts that the government labels as "trust funds" only 14 are real trusts. And none of these are public entitlement funds. The Thrift Savings Plan for federal employee retirement investment is one of these real trusts. Currently at $34 billion it's the largest. (see trust fund list)

Twenty entitlement funds account for 92 percent of the funds supposedly held by all of the accounts on this side of the national debt. What the government calls "Intragovernmental Holdings," another misnomer.

The remaining 118 accounts hold only eight percent of the total in hypothetical funds and are mostly perks for government employees, judges, and so forth. The government sets up these funds the same way they set up entitlement accounts. Name an account, stick some phony bonds in it, and draw money from general taxes as needed.

Whenever extra payroll taxes, gas taxes, airport and airways taxes, unemployment taxes, and other entitlement surpluses arrive in the Treasury, the government immediately takes that money and spends it wherever it pleases. Years in advance, the various committees planning budgets anticipate how much of a surplus they will have and plan accordingly. When the surplus money does come in, it never goes anywhere other than the US Treasury's General Fund and it doesn't sit there for more than a few days at best. Therefore, it's impossible to "raid" a trust fund because entitlement trusts never hold any real money.

Under the pretense of "borrowing" this money, the government then deposits special obligation nonmarketable Treasury bonds in the respective trust fund. This is the absolutely crazy idea that you can both spend and save the same money, and the government often refers to these markers as "an investment." The junk bonds in these accounts are nothing but accounting entries against future taxes—nothing but debt.

We would all be better off if the government didn't do this, if they just took the money and ran. These junk bonds are there only to carry out the charade of borrowing.

To make matters even worse, the pirates then award these accounts annual interest in the form of more junk bonds, more debt, no money involved. They simply pass out more debt like candy from Santa Claus.

The Social Security Trust Funds, currently standing at $1.2 trillion, account for more than 20 percent of the national debt. All twenty entitlement accounts add up to about 38 percent of the national debt. Does that sound like an investment?

This flagrant scam is never going to stop. Even the president's Commission to Strengthen Social Security pussyfoots around the subject and does nothing to put an end to it. Directed solely at the smallest entry-level taxpayers, people just beginning their careers of donating retirement money to the Beltway Bandits pork-barrel spending, this commission might as well have stayed home. Its strongest recommendation is that we take another year to discuss the matter.