On his trip to the moon, George W. Bush has paused for a brief interlude amongst the stars. He can now take pride in the fact that he’s raised the national debt more than any other president in history.

Five months and sixteen days into the 2006 fiscal year, the national debt has gone up $337.2 billion and is holding at a pittance under the statutory limit of $8.184 trillion.

And all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. Congress returned from vacation, opened their Valentines, and has done nothing to propose raising the debt limit in order to allow George to borrow more money.

The media, the watchdogs, the stink tanks, economists, and others supposedly concerned with fiscal discipline haven’t made a peep. In loyal obedience, they are all sitting back and waiting for the engine of our debtor economy to start up again.

The only activity is in John Snow’s Treasury Department. He and his staff of accountants are scurrying all over the place to snatch money from the Thrift Savings Plan, money confiscated from drug dealers, or any other place they can find cash to keep the federal government going. Before Christmas, Snow warned Congress that he couldn’t maintain things beyond mid-March.

They do all this, and still have time to hold “auctions” on as many flavors of treasury securities as Baskin Robbins has of ice cream. Continuing to borrow enough money to pay off the billions in older securities maturing every day and replace them before the lenders have time to cash their checks. They are heavily engaged in “floating” the debt at just twenty-five million under the ceiling.

April fifteenth will provide another respite. While the vast majority of taxpayers will be claiming refunds, there will be a sufficient number of the wealthy filing their final quarterly estimates and many small independent business owners turning in their yearly taxes to allow the government to come out ahead. It will probably generate enough money for another month or so of federal spending even though that money has already been budgeted for specific 2006 programs. It can always be returned after George is allowed to borrow again and as long as foreign countries like China and Japan can be intimidated into loaning us more.

And where does this leave the American taxpayer?

Congress has yet to join in its usual dance of yelling and screaming about “fiscal responsibility” before they do what they always do – raise the debt limit another trillion or so. It’s becoming an annual event. This will be the fourth time they’ve done so in the five years of the Bush administration.

But they can’t stall forever. It’s impossible for them to indefinitely put off raising the debt limit. And I’m not talking about the unending war against an enemy that can’t be identified or profiled, an enemy that can enter our ports and borders anytime they want. I’m talking about how the federal government is hoisted by its own petard – the scam they’ve invented to fleece the taxpaying public.

They can’t stall beyond June because half of the annual “interest” is due entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), an amount that comes to more than $73 billion this June (for a grand total of $146 billion in interest this fiscal year).

There’s no real money involved in this semi-annual payment of so-called interest. All the Treasury does is issue more “special” bonds deposited in the equally bogus trust funds for each of these entitlements. But it does raise the national debt. Like a rocket, it would send them crashing through the current national debt ceiling.

In that respect it’s very real. And it becomes an addition to the future tax to be paid someday by taxpayers and their children if they also become taxpayers.

In fact, it’s already happening with all three of these entitlements. Due to receipt shortfalls, both Medicare and Social Security’s disability insurance have had sporadic withdrawals in the past year. And it’s happening big time with FERS that is billions in the red every month except September when it receives a mysterious deposit of enough bogus bonds to keep it ahead of the game.

In other words, the American taxpayers are already covering shortfalls in these entitlements long before the “baby boomer” scare story is supposed to hit us.

The saddest, most sickening, preposterous part of it all is that there is no legitimate reason for these “interest” payments. They are done only to support and carry on the fraudulent and fictitious story of having “borrowed” or “invested” surpluses taxpayers provided through excessive payroll taxes. The pirates will never admit that these surpluses were stolen and spent elsewhere. At least, that’s the case with Social Security and Medicare.

With FERS, there has never been a surplus. Receipts are always less than outlays. And the only reason there are any receipts at all, any donations or premium payments from federal employees, is so they can chalk up their eight-to-one in matching benefits. The entire program is run on the backs of taxpayers while benefits are always paid from the Treasury’s general fund of current taxpayer dollars or money borrowed (the future tax).

With the federal employees Life & Health program it’s even worse. There are never any receipts at all, yet hundreds of millions per month are paid out in benefits. On top of that, the “outlays” are recorded as “surpluses” increasing the programs holdings. The only saving grace here is that there is never any “interest” deposited against the previous year’s closing balance.

There are also 117 smaller trust funds separate from the entitlements that account for 92 percent of the Intragovernmental Holdings side of the national debt. Except for what was once donated by philanthropists, these other trusts are established by legislation that merely names an account and dumps “special” bonds in the account.

In summary

The Beltway Bandits could do us all a favor by forgetting about dumping “interest” bonds into entitlement accounts piling debt on top of debt. If Bush needs to borrow another hundred billion, all he needs to do is erase that amount from Social Security’s $1.876 trillion in bogus bonds and he would have room under the debt ceiling to borrow more real cash.

In fact, they could start reducing the national debt by 42 percent simply by erasing all of the fraudulent accounts they’ve set up only to disguise their crimes and, in the case of Social Security, Medicare, and some other entitlements, to double tax us.

How long will the public put up with this fraudulent extortion?