A national debt of “more” than $9 trillion; a 700 mile fence across our 1,200 mile border with Mexico, or is it our 2,000 mile border with Mexico; and somewhere between 76 and 90 million “baby boomers” about to retire in 2008, or is it 2012, or 2018 because they all seem to have survived to old age; no wonder the American people can’t separate fact from fiction.

What should we do? Do we simply blame these numerical mistakes on the “dumbing of America” and forget about it? Do we assume that the word merchants of “news” organizations are mathematically challenged and talking to themselves instead of going directly to the sources responsible for the numbers?

Who put “more than $9 trillion” on Wolf Blitzer’s monitor so the simpleton could read it to the public from his new “Situation Room?” And where did his staff get such a figure on the nation’s debt? I would lay odds they got it from some other news network that’s just as lazy and ill informed as they are. Was it too much trouble to go to the Treasury’s web pages where the figure is published every day to the penny?

On October 27, 2006, the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Public Debt posted the national debt standing at $8.566 trillion (eight and a half trillion and change) and that figure was available to anyone with an Internet connection. It means Wolf was wrong by at least $450 billion.

With that level of inattention how can we ever expect “news” people to catch the Enron style tricks of Henry Paulson, the new Secretary of the Treasury who just fudged the 2006 record increase to the debt by holding back $41.4 billion until the first working day in October?

Is it too difficult for Lou Dobbs’ research staff to pull out their Rand McNally road atlas and measure the length of our border with Mexico? California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas pages each have a mileage scale they could “walk off” with a pair of dividers or marks on the edge of a sheet of paper. If they did, they would notice that there’s about 1,430 miles of border with Mexico, not two thousand. And isn’t that interesting? The 700 mile fence Bush has proposed but not funded promises to barricade half of the barn door.

And then there’s the Soap Opera Affect where people who do understand the numbers show us how much things will grow if nothing is done or nothing happens to change present trends. Unfunded liabilities are favorites here with, for instance, something like the national debt which, to make it more dramatic, may be projected to become 24 or 36 trillion in a matter of decades. Joe six-pack can hear that and think; Gee, that’s a long way off and today’s $8.5 trillion debt isn’t even close to such a major problem.

People brought up on a steady diet of witches, vampires, super heroes, psychic phenomena, movies where the bad guys can’t shoot straight, and other fantasies can easily imagine an institutionalized “other” that will take care of things, expert super heroes in white lab coats and back rooms working hard to come up with solutions to our problems.

And what answer to the debt comes from the back room? Why the loyal economists and think tanks tell us that the debt isn’t nearly as much as our Gross Domestic Product, implying that we could pay it off in no time if necessary. All people have to do is send every cent they make to Washington for about ten months. Of course, with no one replacing inventories we would all starve to death in a matter of weeks.

So what is a reasonable schedule to pay off eight and a half trillion in debt? If you go to the mortgage calculators, figure five percent interest, you will find that it would take more than 50 years with payments from $350 to $400 billion a year. Of course, the government would have to give up its huge deficits and running up the debt $615.7 billion as they did in fiscal 2006. A shortfall of almost a trillion a year is impossible.

Most Americans are too busy with their cell phones, blackberries, ipods, video games, spectator sports, and other weapons of mass distraction to notice or pay attention to what’s already a disaster. Washington’s crazy economics is going to fall like a ton of bricks directly on the heads of these naïve citizens.

I had this driven home again this summer when I got into a discussion about Social Security with a young college student working the summer at a local physical therapy clinic for the experience because that’s what she’s studying. To make a long story short, I brought her a printout of one of my articles on the Social Security rip off. She took one look at it and told me; “I can’t read anything with numbers in it. It gives me a headache.”

The worst of it was that this young lady’s greatest problem is borrowing $50,000 for another year at Northwestern University. She is running up a two hundred thousand dollar “unfunded liability” for a college education in a field that only requires certification in a trade where no one cares where you learned to pass the test. And, as the seasoned therapist she was assisting told her, even the hospital where she’s working has a program to train therapists for certification. I suppose that also gave her a headache.

Let’s turn to a more dramatic example

Recently, a friend who follows my Uncle-Scam.com web site sent me a clipping from an article in the Orlando Sentinel, a newspaper in the heart of retirement country. The article was about older tradesmen teaching younger people trades. You can read the clipping by clicking here and remembering that even Jesus Christ was an apprentice carpenter although we have more relics of the cross than we do chairs, tables, fence posts or whatever else he made as a carpenter. The Sentinel views this “apprentice” subject as news and obviously as a way to learn a trade for less than two hundred thousand dollars.

The headline that appeared above a picture of an elderly gentleman showing a younger man how to drill a hole at some construction site was as follows:

At a casual glance, anyone can see that the current “Millennial” generation (that doesn't reach the millenium) isn’t as large as the “Baby boom” generation that’s about to begin retiring in a couple of years. That’s the fear story these crazy numbers are supposed to get across to readers. But take a closer look at these numbers.

The 78.2 million baby boomers come from a 19 year period while Generation X is from a 16 year period and the Millennials (whatever that is) come from an 18 year period, and it’s all supposedly from the U.S. Census Bureau. Apparently, the Sentinel doesn’t believe that a few years here and there can make a difference in our population. And whatever happened to the “hippie” and “yuppie” generations?

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the baby-boomer numbers misquoted. If you want to see a slew of newspaper screwups that followed Clinton’s famous “fix the roof while the sun shines” speeches of the nineties click here.

The most likely truth is that Rhodes scholar President Bill Clinton missed the decimal point between the two numbers in his notes when he said that “76 million baby boomers” were looming on the horizon and about to wreck havoc on the Social Security supplemental retirement insurance program. A figure that was later “rounded off” by Alan Greenspan to 77 million boomers. See “Boomer Myth” on my web site for the real census figures and remember – no one in government ever said this represents births above normal.

As far as I can tell, the population would have increased 69 million between 1946 and 1965 if there had never been a World War II where sixteen million lusty servicemen and women returned from the various theaters of war after Germany surrendered in March and Japan surrendered in September of 1945. The gestation period for humans is still nine months isn’t it?

This is, however, the first time I’ve seen the baby boomers referred to as a 19 year period instead of 20 years from 1946 through 1965. Oh well, what makes a “generation” anyway? I left home at seventeen and the military “draft” starts at eighteen when kids are still gullible and susceptible to authority figures. When do we wean our children and what’s the minimum age for astronauts? Do you think judgment and experience have something to do with trusting them to handle something more expensive than a gun? Helen of Troy was only twelve when she caused all that trouble for the Greeks.

And isn’t it interesting that the Orlando Sentinel somehow puts their baby-boomer figure at 78.2 million when the amount stolen from Social Security during fiscal 2006 just happens to be $78.2 billion? I don’t believe in coincidences in numbers even though a million is much different than a billion. It’s almost as though the reporter asked Mr. Monk or someone in the federal government (they all have their confidential sources) the wrong question.

In fact, the numbers in this chart look made up by a fourth grader and definitely not from the Census Bureau. If you divide the numbers by their time periods, each of the three come out to a 4.1 million average per year. Where's the "boom?" If we add three years at this rate to the "Generation X" category just to equalize the time span at 19 years there would be exactly 78.2 million here too. Whatever happened to honest if not good journalism?

If we are ever going to get serious about the problem of Social Security we better start with the fact that its “trust fund” just topped $2 trillion and is composed of nothing but debt, nothing but a method of double taxing us for the billions that the government steals every year and expects us to pay again just as we are already paying for so many of their other debit black hole entitlement accounts that make up more than 40 percent of the national debt. We give them extra money and they give us debt in return, plus annual interest added to the pile – the Pay-It-Again Sam scam.

And now we’re going to go out and vote for these crooks and their apprentices so we can give them even more money. Isn’t that nice?