BOGUS BABBLE BONDS
Thank you, Mr. Greenspeak
No sooner did Ether Zone publish my article “Number Of The Beast” than one of the People’s Open Opposition Party’s active members e-mailed me to relate how one of the Treasury’s Bureau of Public Debt pages had changed the classification of the national debt outstanding. No longer is the debt divided into “Public Debt” and “Federal Debt.” It’s now known as “Debt Held by the Public” and “Intragovernmental Holdings.” Isn’t that cute? (see: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt1.htm#months)

Did the new Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Henry O’Neill, cause this, or did it happen after last week’s report by Alan Greenspan to the Senate Budget Committee? Personally, I think it came from Mr. Greenspeak, the idol of Congress and the media. He used this terminology in the question and answer period of his presentation, along with other fictions like the baby-boomer scare.

Naturally, the People’s Open Opposition Party must now refine its definition of the two sides of the national debt.

We never did like referring to the side composed mostly of entitlement trust funds as “Federal Debt.” Words that deliberately carry the misleading implication that this debt can be handled by something other than taxes paid by the public. But we also went on to describe the “nonmarketable” bonds held by all of these trust funds (except the government’s own Thrift Savings Account) as bogus special obligation funny money bonds, similar to promissory chits or markers from the Mafia.

In honor of Mr. Greenspan, we will now refer to these promissory markers as “bogus babble bonds.”

Now might also be a good time to clue you into the fact that the vast majority of the 163 of 164 trust funds stuffed with bogus babble bonds are “perks” for government people. Most of them do not hold nearly the amounts held by entitlement accounts, but they are there nonetheless.

Please see: http://www.poop.org/basics/t-list.htm for a complete list of all federal trust funds holding more than 300 million in bogus babble bonds as of the end of April 1999.

These phony bonds are a wonderfully convenient way to set up perks. All that is necessary is to name a trust, fill it with whatever amount of these babble bonds you like, and then when real money is required it will come out of annual income taxes paid by the public. A neat little scam that works on the same principle as the Pay-It-Again, Sam double taxation plan with Social Security and Medicare surpluses.

It's also a great way to pay hush-money to more than two million federal employees, many of whom are accountants with the GAO, CBO, Treasury and so forth. Employees who know precisely what's going on with the wholesale rip-off of your entitlement money.