The same government that believes it can spend and save the same money, that you need lock-boxes when you have trust funds, and debt laundering isn't a crime, now chooses to teach business ethics to private enterprise. Supreme hypocrisy.

Do you know what "The Unified Budget" is? It's been around since Lyndon Johnson's time. It's a way to disguise amounts stolen from entitlements, particularly retirement and health care money. Politicians and bureaucrats use it whenever they want to paint things rosy. Mostly, when they want to talk about surpluses.

When they want to cry poormouth, talk about deficits or disappearing surpluses, raise taxes, or just scare the public, they then cite "on budget" receipts and expenditures, pretending that "off budget" doesn't exist. In fact, they just ignore both of these unified budget categories and talk about the budget as though they didn't steal a thing, as though entitlements don't even exist.

Confused? You're supposed to be. That's the point.

Enron and their accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, cooked the books so the company looked better than it was. They hid debt and created a lot of other false figures. Then, when investors started getting wise and their stock started to slide, Ken Lay, the president, told his people to hang on, things would get better, the company would return to the top and all would be well—tomorrow the world. And his people bought it.

Employees who were heavily vested in Enron stock decided to follow their leader, to take his advice, to ride out the storm. People who should have known about caveat emptor, people who were products of our wonderful educational system and who could have sold their holdings at any time, decided to stick with the ship believing that the captain would repair damages and plot a course to retirement in a tropical paradise.

Now that these same employees realize that the captain and his officers jumped ship some time ago, these same people are hanging on to flotsam and waiting to be rescued by the government. A government that's been in collusion with the captain for a long time and has even done these same people a greater disservice by stealing their other supplemental retirement money. Disingenuous pillars of integrity like Dick Gephardt and Barbara Boxer are rising to the task of making certain nothing like this happens again in private industry. Ironic isn't it?

Government does it better.

One hundred and forty million working people, the backbone of this nation, have yet to realize how their leaders are screwing them. They are still in the stages of trusting their elected officials and following the Pied Piper to paradise.

Before the ship changed course towards Afghanistan and the world of underground terrorists, the crew had all of the clues they needed to burst the bubble of lies and deceit that envelops them. The new Secretary of the Treasury, the nation's purser, had decided to be honest by telling everyone that there were no viable assets in the Social Security Trust Fund, that it held nothing but debt markers or demands against future taxes.

And Arthur Anderson equivalents, expert economists, were all trying to soften the picture by honestly telling everyone the same mantra. If and when Social Security might have to turn to its trust fund, the government would be faced with "tough decisions" to either (1) raise taxes (2) borrow huge amounts in the public's name, or (3) cut benefits—reduce pay-outs. All of which means that America's workers pay again, replace the money that's been stolen plus interest. The Pay-It-Again, Sam scam—plain and simple double taxation in the trillions. The federal government was in deep doo-doo.

But alas, the war to outlast all wars has replaced and overshadowed this exposé or fleecing of America. A diversion that Ken Lay and Arthur Anderson didn't have in their bag of tricks.

So, we're back to where we started.

Right now, the democrats and liberal press/media are screaming about "deficits" and blaming the republican administration for plunging the nation into fiscal chaos. They support everything that's been done on the war effort and to increase homeland security, but they claim the republican administration lacks fiscal responsibility. Of course, it's an election year and they are scrambling desperately for issues, but they use the government's double bookkeeping to do it.

The "unified" budget has been completely shuffled aside and the complainers are talking strictly about "on budget" receipts and expenditures or surpluses and deficits.

For all practical purposes, on-budget receipts come from income taxes, including corporate taxes that average about 20 percent of the total. This is what the 1997 Balanced Budget Act promised to "balance" by the year 2002. A date that was picked because "off budget" receipts were expected to be greater than any deficit ever run, and that is happening true to prediction.

Off-budget receipts are strictly from entitlements. They are the surpluses or overcharges from Social Security, Medicare, gas taxes, Airports & Airways, Unemployment taxes, and about a dozen other entitlements, even Indian funds. All money that is not supposed to be spent elsewhere.

Here's the way it looked in the fiscal 2001 "Unified" Budget result

As you can see, we had an "on budget" deficit last year. Fiscal 2002 will not be the first time for a deficit in several years as some of the mathematically challenged press people want you to believe. Nor is Social Security the only entitlement robbed.

In July and August of 2001, politicians and the media were arguing over the smaller surplus expected at the end of September, the end of the government's fiscal year. The Congressional Budget Office was predicting a surplus of only $153-158 billion, much less than fiscal 2000's surplus of $236.9 billion.

The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Deseret News, and many other liberal newspapers were publishing articles and editorials complaining about the "disappearing surplus." Check the archives. Here's just one of them:

Boston Globe, September 5, 2001: "The federal budget surplus for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 has plummeted from an estimated $275 billion predicted in May to $153 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The 10-year budget surplus estimates have dropped to $3.4 trillion from $5.6 trillion. That money includes the currently overfunded accounts used to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits."

Republicans were countering with the fact that they had given people a rebate and the expected surplus was still the second largest in American history. Some even claimed that the end of the fiscal year, only weeks away, would show a $160 to $170 billion surplus. When they talked only about the "on budget" figure, they predicted there would still be a $1 billion surplus even after the tax rebate.

Well, here we are with all the final figures in and nobody is mentioning the surplus. How come?

The democrats are making hay with the "on budget" deficit. Even Mitch Daniels has to be read closely or listened to intently when he talks about "deficits for the next three years" to see that he's talking only of on-budget accounting.

Hoisted by their own petard, republicans can't brag about the surplus without also showing how much they've stolen from entitlements. But the republicans are not guiltless of other related swindles.

President Bush claimed that he would only use Social Security funds to pay down the national debt or for national emergencies. During fiscal 2001, as in all years, Social Security's surplus was spent elsewhere and spent as fast as it came in (see: Analyze This). During fiscal 2001, they paid only $66 billion against the national debt and that debt rose a total of $133.5 billion.

Besides that, to bolster their debt laundering operation the government has deleted the long-term 30 year Treasury bond and the war to outlast all wars is costing us a mere $1 billion a month, $12 billion per year. A mere drop in the bucket compared to the entitlement money they are absconding.

And these are the people who are now going to investigate and punish Enron? You've got to be kidding?