With the end of fiscal 2003 staring us in the face a mere ten weeks from tomorrow, Washington is abuzz with the new estimate of a $455 billion deficit this year. That's $151 billion more than the Office of Management and Budget predicted just three months ago, and it is not the whole story.

With its Enron style bookkeeping, the government has a different method of defining a deficit. It comes with two major elements.

First, and regardless of the condition of the economy, the government is going to plan on spending more money than it spent in the preceding year. Even when they know that tax receipts cannot possibly produce the money they want, they will still plan an ever greater budget. Unlike you or me or state and local governments that must tighten belts, the federal government will simply borrow whatever amount it needs to make up for any shortfall in tax revenue.

It does this by selling U.S. Treasury securities to investors and other tricky means we'll cover in a moment. Defined in the Constitution, contracting to borrow from investors was designed and meant as an emergency method of raising money for wars, natural disasters, and so forth. In the last twenty-five years, it has been abused to preposterous levels.

Borrowing money that must someday be paid off by the public doesn't bother them much. In fact, Congress and the administration will worry more about the annual interest than the principal since interest payments must be included in their yearly budget planning. And they will make all sorts of excuses for the necessity of borrowing.

You can hear them now talking about how a $455 billion deficit is only 4.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a compilation of figures from corporations known to and being prosecuted for lying about their income, production, sales, and debt in order to bolster their stock market value. Corruption feeding on corruption.

Secondly, the federal government defines a deficit not by the amount it must borrow to make ends meet but by the amount it goes "over budget." This subtle difference allows them to play games with things like your payroll tax overcharges. A deception that currently allows them extra revenue ranging from $150 to $200 billion a year from Social Security and other entitlement surpluses. What is planned in the budget as "off budget" revenue.

If this surplus retirement, health care, highway, and other supposedly dedicated entitlement money is deliberately planned into the budget, it therefore cannot be considered "over budget." Isn't that clever? It's like drinking champagne on a beer budget and then blaming the liquor companies for causing a deficit by raising the price of champagne after you decided how much you must consume in order to feel drunk with power.

Yes, surpluses still exist despite propaganda to the opposite from millionaire monitor readers masquerading as news people. Entitlements have always accounted for the major portion of any surplus with Social Security leading the pack.

The federal government goes to great lengths pretending to "borrow" this surplus retirement and other entitlement money. They set up phony trust funds, appoint trustees, and even pay annual interest on what they've pretended to borrow. By doing so, they also further establish the granddaddy of all implied contracts, a subject in itself and one that completely obliterates the argument that payroll taxes are the government's money and the same as income taxes. If it were their money they wouldn't be pretending to borrow it.

If they are not borrowing this money, then they are stealing it. They can't have it both ways or argue one side or the other when convenient.

If it is borrowed money, as all their actions or behavior would indicate, then it must be included with other borrowed money, not ignored. Again, they can't have it both ways.

To argue, on the one hand, that they've merely "borrowed" your Social Security retirement money, and then not include it in their deficit with other borrowed money, is to commit exactly the same sort of malfeasance Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and other private sector corporations are accused of when it comes to double bookkeeping, hiding debt, presenting a rosier picture, and so forth. In the words of George W. Bush, anyone who does this deserves to be in handcuffs.

What's more, when the government pretends to "borrow" this money they would like you to believe that the government is going to pay it back without using your money to do so. To require the "lenders" to pay it back is double taxation, plain and simple, plus the absolutely ludicrous addition of interest tacked on at no expense to the government. This would be the greatest economic scam ever pulled on the public of any country, would it not? What do you suppose it means when the Social Security trust funds are currently 22 percent of the national debt—your debt, or what will be passed on to your children?

Last year, fiscal 2002, with a sour economy and a shortfall in expected revenue, these entitlements still managed to produce a $149 billion surplus for the government to enjoy/borrow/steal ($89 billion from Social Security alone) and count into their budget without recording it as over budget—without recording it as part of the real deficit.

You can, therefore, count on the real deficit for fiscal 2003 to be over $600 billion by September 30th of this year, the end of fiscal 2003. All you have to do is follow the increase in the national debt that already stands, as of June 17th, at an increase of $494 billion this year. And this is only the tip of the scamberg.