Our rulers have surpluses coming out of their ears. And they have deficits too. How is this possible, you say? It's easy when you have more than one set of books. And it's wonderful as long as the set with surplus is larger than the set with a deficit.

The books our government uses cover "on budget" accounting, "off budget" accounting and the "unified budget." They pick and choose which one they want to talk about depending on what they want to hide or which way the wind blows.

Right now, when they want to cry poor mouth, they're talking about deficits from on-budget accounting. This is the set with revenues mostly from personal income and corporate taxes and where spending was once called "discretionary" as opposed to mandatory obligations. It's also where most of last year's tax cuts came from.

If the attack on our New World Order tentacles hadn't occurred just three weeks before the close of the fiscal year, this on-budget set of books would have finished close to zero. However, aid to New York City, the airline industry, the immediate military and information build-up, home security and so forth took care of that. We ended the fiscal year $33.5 billion in the hole as far as the on-budget books are concerned. There's already a deficit here.

If the media and the watchdogs of the press ever bothered to check with the bank, the US Treasury, they would know this and you might hear something about it. But these harried news gatherers pick up their information via the Newberry syndrome. Gossip from the barbershop, Guber's garage, the Sheriff's Office, Aunt Bea's or from politicians. It all passes for fact instead of the hearsay that it is. If there were any accuracy to their reports, or if they at least followed it up with accuracy from the bank, they would not be telling you things like "the days of surpluses are over," or that this year, fiscal 2002, will produce the first deficit in several years. We just had the sort of deficit they're talking about and its a matter of record.

The off-budget set of books are never in deficit, they always have huge surpluses. Well, almost always. Last year, fiscal 2001, they were $160.7 billion to the good.

Back in 1983, the Social Security portion of off-budget accounting was running in the red a little. For seven years in a row, the Social Security administration had turned to its trust fund to balance the books, to meet its obligations to the retired and disabled. This upset politicians no end. It's not a pleasant sight when the skimmers are forced to return some of the cash they've stolen.

The reason it upset them was that when any of these entitlements turn to their trust fund the money must come out of the Treasury's General Fund, its common pool of tax money on hand, and that money is already scheduled for something else. It usually means that Congress and/or the Administration must give up some of their pork larder.

Social Security never drew more than five billion a year and there were still plenty of bogus chits in the debit black hole trust from previous years where the pirates had spent surpluses elsewhere, setting taxpayers up for a second round pay-back. But a few years in a row had been enough to panic the bandits and they appointed the Greenspan Commission to study "saving" Social Security. Sound familiar?

The result was that payroll taxes were raised in 1983, and raised to the point there should never be a Social Security crisis again. It's been the cash-cow ever since. The goose that lays the golden eggs. The major source of their wild spending.

The same thing happened in the Nineties when the Department of Transportation wanted to cash in all of its relatively small trust fund for the repair of Interstate Highways. They actually withdrew five billion one year and by the next year gas taxes were raised four cents to make sure this didn't happen again.

It was the same with Medicare before the pirates found out that unscrupulous doctors had been double-billing the system to the tune of some $23 billion.

Nowadays, all of the entitlements are producing surpluses. Some, like Social Security are handing the Beltway Bandits huge amounts ($98.7 billion last year) that the bandits account for on their "off-budget" books.

The beauty of it all is that politicians can raise taxes on the off-budget books without the public noticing much. In other words, they don't risk their jobs or re-election the way they might if they even suggested raising personal income taxes on the on-budget side.

The off-budget books cover money people pay all over the place for things like gasoline, airline tickets, unemployment compensation, and of course payroll taxes plus at least a dozen other things. They don't come due just once a year, and who has the time or ability to keep track of them anyway? Certainly not the media watchdogs.

This bookkeeping has worked so well that the Beltway Bandits have been able to start paying down the national debt. Of course, they're just paying down one side of it because this too is another set of double bookkeeping—public debt and "Intragovernmental Debt."

In reality, the national debt isn't going down—it's going up. But that's only because of the bookkeeping. We haven't added any debt to the Public Debt side since 1998. We renew trillions of securities maturing all of the time, but we haven't increased honest borrowing since the Balanced Budget Act of Novermber, 1997.

Even with the $33.5 billion on-budget deficit last year, we didn't go to investors to make up the deficit. Instead, we stole it from entitlements.

Every time the government uses entitlement money to pay down the honest investor, public debt, they add to the dishonest "intragovernmental" side because they want you to believe that they just borrowed the money. Last year, fiscal 2001, they paid down the honest side $66 billion and the dishonest stolen from entitlements side went up $199.3 billion. Overall, the national debt went up $133.5 billion. Don't forget the interest paid the dishonest side by just handing entitlements more debt.

The government has no money except what it gets from taxpayers. Taxpayers have always been responsible for the government's debt, it's what makes Treasury securities "the safest investment in the world." And the honest investor side of the national debt was granted in the Constitution, even though the bandits are taking steps to get rid of it because their scam works better. They've already gotten rid of the 30 year bond with more to come.

When it comes to double bookkeeping and hiding debt, Enron has nothing on the federal government.

And the loyal press, the watchdogs of the Fourth Estate, are either in collusion with the crooks or running around like nitwits talking about deficits and singing "happy days are here again" as they tell you how the recession is over. It's not a pretty picture.