LAUNDERING by Ed Henry November, 1999
	..........I have a South Florida friend who spent five years in prison for carrying a substantial pile of money to the Cayman Islands. He was paid to do it. It's a criminal offense when someone tries to take cash from suspicious or any activities and invest it in normal channels without paying taxes. It's called "money laundering." ..........It is not, however, a punishable offense when the federal government does it. .........................................................................Federal Laundry ..........The words "off budget" have been replaced by the words "surplus." Words that were once used to disguise the fact that Congress and the Administration were stealing money from entitlement payments like Social Security are now replaced by more honest words meant to accomplish the same deception while implying that the government has done something good. The new terms are more honest only because most entitlements have always been collecting more money than they need and it was always a "surplus"—a surplus to steal. ..........Nowadays, instead of implying that the tooth fairy left this unnoticed windfall under their pillows, Congress and the Administration want us to believe that the government has accomplished some sort of miraculous savings. ..........It has become so outlandishly acceptable that President Clinton can now propose that we pile debt on top of debt by paying off the national debt with the same stolen money. All we have to do is take excess payroll taxes and every other entitlement's "surplus" and instead of spending it elsewhere we turn it over to elsewhere-land at the national debt fairyland park. ..........In other words, if it were all Social Security's future money we could take $5.7 trillion of it, pay off the national debt, and we would only be left with $5.7 trillion more in nonmarketable bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund which is also part of the national debt. Sounds insane, doesn't it? ..........Actually, it's only $3.8 trillion that we would need to re-pile or launder. $1.9 trillion of the national debt (34 percent) is already held by distrust funds. .......................................................................Workable ..........To understand the feasibility of this plan, you need to understand how the criminal mind works. First, we're going to take a good part of the "surplus" (skimming) produced by excess taxation of entitlements, a surplus we've been stealing for years anyway, only this time we're going to put it to work for something good. Instead of using it to finance wars, international and national police, establishing world banking and other pork-barrel activities under the buddy-system, we're going to get rid of the national debt. We're going to get rid of a huge burden imposed on our children. After all, the family is everything, right? ..........We take this money and every year we start paying off members of the general public and foreigners who hold Treasury bonds, bills, notes and savings bonds—all of those little old ladies and other investors who have loaned us money ($3.8 trillion) over the past twenty years or so. Without ever missing a heartbeat, we pay their holdings as they mature anyway but, this time, we will not issue new securities to be immediately sold on the open market to replace these payouts. We can't do it all at once because the Bureau of Public Debt tells us we're now replacing over a trillion a year, but we can do it a good chunk at a time. Surpluses from Social Security alone are gaining phenomenal proportions and expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2012, so we can probably do it easily within the next 15 years or so. ..........Now, once we have all the little old ladies paid off we'll have a huge pile of nonmarketable Treasury certificates in the various trust funds, but who cares about that? ..........These promissory notes don't have anything to do with the open market. They don't effect our international credit rating. They are just debt that the public is supposed to pay off someday, right? So we'll do them a big favor. We'll bankrupt each and every one of these notes. Wipe them off the books. Delete them. ..........Everybody will be overjoyed. We all win. (see: John Gotti for President)