How would you feel if you made a payment on your mortgage and then your bank told you that, because you did this, you now owe that much more? Would you be upset? Then why aren't you upset about the government doing exactly the same thing to you?

I sincerely wish there was some way to justify what our representative government has been doing to us because I can't find it. Believe me, I’ve been looking everywhere for some reasonable explanation that might paint our elected politicians as something other than outright crooks. People that ought to be in jail, and would be, if they were anything other than the lawmakers of this country. Hypocrites that are not held to their own rules. People above the law.

I’m an old geezer with nothing to gain from any of this. I’ve got much more pleasant and constructive things to do, ranging from playing a little ragtime piano to fixing up the old family house that Bonnie and I returned to after my father died in 1984 and constitutes one of our greatest assets. I’ve also got a Caribbean soul that keeps reminding me that there are more laid back places to live happily close to nature with little to worry about except the occasional hurricane. Like sailing, it’s nothing but pure pleasure, tranquillity, and even boredom, punctuated by a few brief moments of absolute terror.

But I’ve also got a highly qualified research mind, developed after years of market research in Chicago. Listening to Ross Perot in the early Nineties and reading Meredith Bagby’s pamphlet “An Annual Report of the United States of America,” I started looking into the National Debt and how we ever got into this mess.

It’s not possible to study the National Debt without noticing the role played by entitlement trust funds that now, along with government perks, make up almost 40 percent of the debt. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to Social Security’s major problem and why others tied up in actuarial data can’t see the forest for the trees.

Ever since 1983, when the Greenspan Commission recommended taking Social Security off the pay-as-you-go system and putting it on a “partial reserve” system, extra FICA taxes have provided the largest slush fund for Congress and the Administration to rob. This extra slush fund money kept growing and growing until reaching multiples whereby the government could anticipate greater booty than they ever got by running honest deficits. Therefore, in 1997 they passed a balanced “unified” budget agreement for the year 2002, and started a money laundering operation to pay down the honest borrowing side of the debt by something like 2010. Just last year, the windfall profits from Social Security overcharges reached $94.4 billion and, along with other entitlement excesses, provided a total of $149.8 billion in bonuses for a dishonest government to use as it sees fit. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. This theft is headed for the trillions.

There was nothing wrong with the “partial reserve” system recommended by the Greenspan Commission in 1983, the last time Social Security was supposedly “in trouble.” Had excesses been invested wisely, we would all be sitting on at least $1.016 trillion in positive assets and well on our way towards a true pension system instead of a supplemental retirement system. Instead, we’ve got that much in nonmarketable nonsense bonds stuffed in what is not a true trust fund and about to grow into a $4 trillion liability by 2012.

Every time the federal government takes our excess Social Security, Medicare, fuel oil, unemployment, Airport & Airways and dozens of other extra entitlement payments we make, they place nonsense bonds in nonsense trust funds dollar-for-dollar while telling us that they are “protecting” our money. It’s nothing but debt that they give us for real money they spend elsewhere, with interest added into the debit black hole every year in the same nonsense form.

You might also ask yourself why your current President George W. Bush talks about a “contingency fund” when the federal government has always had an emergency method of raising billions overnight. An honest method of borrowing through forthright contracts with lenders requiring nothing more than real cash annual interest and a final payback. Something you’ve now been taught is as evil as communism. Something called “running a deficit.” A system left to us by our forefathers and completely negating any need for contingency funding. One of the things that truly makes government different than a business in the private sector. Backed by the “full faith and credit” of every taxpayer in the nation.

And why does none of this make the ever present media news? Why do so called investigative analysts and penetrating hard question talking heads avoid the subject entirely, not pursuing it when it comes up on its own through a slip of the tongue by their many government guests? These media people are not as dumb as they sound you know.

But most of all, ask yourself how the Social Security Trust Fund can account for $1.016 trillion of the National Debt as of the close of fiscal 2000 and growing monthly. Please, somebody explain how I'm wrong about this nonpartisan rip-off that constitutes the greatest monetary crime ever committed by a government against its citizens.

I’m waiting for an answer. And I will not accept the idea that you are a product of the “dumbing of America” or that you believe the federal government has sources of revenue other than what it gets from taxpayers.