Setting the government's Enron style bookkeeping aside, the real deficit for fiscal 2002 that ended September 30th was $421 billion. That's how much the government had to borrow to make ends meet.

It's getting worse. So far this year the borrowholics have already run the tab up another $54.3 billion in the first month. If we keep this up, it's going to add about $650 billion to the national debt this year, fiscal 2003. And that's without a war with Iraq.

Thoughts of launching an all out first strike invasion of Iraq at this time seems tantamount to an ant crawling up an elephant's leg with rape on its mind or a bag lady pushing her grocery cart down the dock to put a deposit on a 150 foot yacht with a helicopter pad and a crew of nine.

By all estimates, an invasion of Iraq would cost us at least another $100 billion, not counting the loss of lives on both sides or maintaining troops in that country with another $10 billion per month. It's absolutely insane. I think Bush has flipped his lid.

And that's not the whole story.

The records show that American taxpayers were double taxed in fiscal 2002 to the tune of $48.9 billion. Quite a bit more than anyone received in a tax break.

This happened because nine entitlements cashed-in some of the phony bonds accumulated in their trust funds. The Unemployment Trust Fund alone cashed-in $25.7 billion under the Pay-It-Again Sam scam. Due entirely to the number of people unemployed, drawing monthly unemployment checks and extended unemployment granted by Congress.

It doesn't matter that these taxes were paid previously by employers. During the bubble years, the Beltway Bandits took surplus unemployment money, celebrated and bragged about it, then spent that money wherever they pleased. They pretended to "borrow" it.

Asking us to believe that it's possible to both spend and save the same money, they then put those wonderful "special obligation" bonds in the trust and called them IOUs, making it sound like they, themselves, would somehow repay the money when the time came.

It was just "Intragovernmental" debt, you know, the government owing itself or one department owing another.

Well, now you see what happens when cash is needed. When the Labor Department needed more than it had coming in with current employer taxes, they cashed-in some of these bogus bonds and the cash came right out of the Treasury's General Fund of income taxes on hand. Either that or the money had to be borrowed from investors by selling legitimate and honest Treasury securities on the bond market.

The result is that every taxpayer in the country either forked over money that should have gone for education, defense, or some other item of discretionary spending or it went on the credit card for our kids to pay later with interest.

That's double taxation folks, plain and simple. And it happened with nine different trust funds during fiscal 2002.

What do you suppose it's going to be like when the really big trust funds like Social Security ($1.3 trillion), Military Retirement ($162 billion), Medicare ($268 billion) and the Federal Employees Retirement ($586 billion) trusts start to cash in their holdings? Did you think that the military and the government itself are somehow exempt from the baby-boomer scare story?

To top it off, receipts from personal and corporate income taxes were way off during fiscal 2002, due to the same unemployment and people taking jobs that pay less, so the government had to borrow to make up for those shortfalls.

Even Social Security, the Beltway Bandit's largest slush fund, was down for the first time since 1983. Instead of producing the $107 billion surplus that would have come in during normal times, this year's surplus was below the $98.7 billion pilfered in fiscal 2001. During fiscal 2002, the poor dears had to make do with a Social Security surplus of only $88.9 billion to run off with. Obviously, it wasn’t enough to make up for the shortfalls and all the wild spending going on.

The public knows how to tighten its belt even if the government doesn't. Consumers aren't spending like they should, manufacturers are clearing inventory and not investing in new products or new tooling, and everyone but the government is trying to liquidate as much debt as possible. People are working harder to keep their jobs and the government is surprised that "productivity is up."

State and local governments are also in trouble. Most are trying to raise taxes to build bigger jails to house inmates from another war—the war on drugs. No one is doing too well and again "it's the economy stupid."

All the weapons of mass distraction Bush and his media moguls throw at us are not going to change this. The day of reckoning is coming and it's going to show that the government makes Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and the rest of the swindlers look like amateurs.

Government can't produce anything but weapons of mass distraction. They certainly can't solve our economic problem when they are the cause of most of it. And they have no intention of reforming, much less admitting it.

The first step in any true reform is to stop the bleeding, and that would take standing up and admitting "I am a borrowholic."