At the end of August, the national debt stood at $8.5 trillion, an increase of $582.3 billion so far this year. When the government closes its fiscal year on September 30th, the debt will easily top $600 billion. It’s just a matter of how far we go beyond this new record mark unless Henry Paulson, the new Secretary of the Treasury, plays with the books by paying off a significant amount of the maturing investor borrowing without replacing it until after we enter the new fiscal year.

To add this much debt in an election year is another example of Bush’s supreme arrogance and desperate need for more money. It also means that by next March we’ll need Congress to rubber stamp another roughly one trillion dollar increase to the debt limit on the one year anniversary of the last increase.

Your exorbitant payroll taxes for Social Security are now 23 percent of the national debt and stand at almost $2 trillion ($1.987 trillion as of August 31, 2006) because the government “borrowed” and spent the extra/surplus taxes you paid and the supplemental retirement system didn’t need.

This same surplus that the government steals from the only healthy system in Washington also provides us with the most reliable first indicator of the month-to-month job situation in America. Its ups and downs tell us something about how many people are working and/or how much they’re making.

For obvious reasons, the loyal economists and mathematically challenged news media will not report this.

Notice that we had a sharp spike in the surplus during August of this year. This is good news for the pirates because it brings them within $7.4 billion of last August’s booty. If this continues, they may come close to the $86.5 billion stolen from Social Security in 2005. And that’s certainly better for them than the $71.1 billion of 2004.

This does not tell us whether the “spike” was due to more jobs, pay increases, individual states increasing their minimum wage, manipulations just prior to midterm elections, or even illegal aliens suddenly contributing payroll taxes because they fear deportation and perhaps their leaders are telling them to build a “we pay taxes” defense.

Besides the amounts malappropriated by the government, the patterns illustrated in this chart show an overall job situation that hasn’t changed much in three years. If we were truly in a "robust" and "booming" economy, payroll tax surpluses would be hovering around the hundred billion Clinton years.