Payroll tax surpluses are one of the first indicators of the job situation in America. The federal government always uses these surpluses for their own purposes, hopes you don’t notice, and immediately substitutes “special” Treasury bonds in so-called “trust funds” so you can someday pay these same taxes again, plus interest.

Setting that continuing crime aside for the moment, here’s the latest from the U.S. Treasury:

(This table has been made directly from the U.S. Treasury Monthly Statements, table eight “Trust Fund Impact on Budget Results and Investment Holdings” and represents the combinations of the Federal Old Age & Survivors Insurance and the Federal Disability Insurance trusts.)

What could this January’s low level surplus mean? In 2004, the accumulated surplus by the end of January was $21 billion. In 2005, it was $23.5 billion. This year, it’s $6.8 billion. That’s a heck of a drop.

Could it be that the new job numbers we’ve been hearing are all low paying jobs? Or is it that they are simply not sufficient to keep up with the number of people being laid off? Maybe, it’s a combination of both or the government is just making up new job numbers.

It’s also interesting to note that in January the government had to take $1.4 billion (one thousand four hundred million) from the general fund to make unemployment payments to the jobless. Unemployment tax receipts from employers were not sufficient to meet demand.

You can’t blame all of this on hurricane Katrina. Even with nearly a half million people washed out of their homes and jobs in New Orleans, it doesn’t account for this sort of drop in payroll taxes. And George Bush’s promise to rebuild the Gulf Coast bigger and better than ever in the greatest reconstruction effort the world has ever seen should have resulted in more work to do, more jobs, not fewer.

Maybe it has something to do with the 35 million illegal aliens that have entered the country since Bush took office, law breakers who are not paying payroll taxes or being reported by the people who hire them. Coupled with the high cost of heating homes and businesses this winter and a lackluster Christmas retail season, could this account for the sudden drop after the manipulators of trust fund fraud walked off with $86.5 billion of the American worker’s retirement money last year?

The silver lining is that, if this trend continues, the Beltway Bandits are not going to have as much loot to throw into their war chest this year. But don’t worry; they’ll come up with some crooked way to replace this “off budget” revenue, maybe by increasing payroll taxes for the sixth year in a row – another thing Bush lies about (see table).