These bonds and trust funds now make up close to 40 percent of the National Debt. A big chunk of the $5.7 trillion debt this country has been running up ever since we began driving the Russians into the ground economically in order to win the Cold War.

You can check this out by starting with the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Public Debt National Debt to the penny site at: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm

From there, you can go to “Who holds the Debt?” on the Bureau of Public Debt’s page: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt.htm Here you will find that the debt is divided into two large categories; Debt Held by the Public and Intragovernmental Holdings (sometimes called Federal Debt). The page will give you each of these totals month by month, but pay most attention to the Prior Fiscal Years.

The federal government likes to use words to confuse and screen real issues. Public Debt comes from the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds, bills, notes and so forth on the open market. Sales to investors who contract with the government to loan money for a period of time at a profit. Instead of public debt, I call this “Investor Debt” which is more honest and descriptive. We allow the government to sell these bonds in order to raise cash overnight in case of emergencies or the unforeseen. It’s honest borrowing. Everyone knows exactly what they’re getting. Unfortunately, it’s also known as running a deficit. A term your government has taught everyone to fear and believe evil, probably because it’s the opposite of their dishonest side. (see: Deficits, better than stealing)

The other side of the national debt, what the government likes to cloud in Greenspanalese, is composed almost entirely of entitlement trust funds holding nonmarketable nonsense bonds.

If its ever paid off, both sides of the debt will be paid off with tax dollars in the Treasury’s General Fund. Year by year, we will have to make payments against it, with money that comes largely from personal income and corporate tax, where companies build it into products and services they sell. In other words, there’s no one but the public to pay off the debt in one way or another. It’s all the nation’s debt.

For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter that the trust funds never hold any real cash because that’s always in the General Fund, but everyone tends to confuse these debit black holes with real trust funds found in the private sector. It’s a habit. A habit of thinking of trust funds as fiduciary accounts with trustees responsible for the stewardship of wealth. Even the Beltway Bandits who confess to robbing entitlement money will talk about “raiding trust funds” when that isn’t quite what happens.

Because I call these accounts debit black holes, it does not mean that you can simply forget about them, write them off as a fiction, or turn your backs on them. The nonmarketable nonsense bonds that these accounts hold are very real promissory notes.

The federal government takes your entitlement money, spends it wherever it pleases, and then deposits these bogus bonds in the respective entitlement’s trust fund. You give them cash. They give you debt. And double taxation, with interest.

Now you can call that “borrowing” if you want. I call it theft. In fact, it’s extortion and fraud. If anyone in the private sector did this, they would be in jail. It’s the same as robbing your child’s piggy bank and then leaving a note inside saying that he or she must replace the money, with interest. And that you can and will enforce it.

It’s a racket that’s been going on for years, but no one cared too much as long as the amounts were small and easily recovered. In 1983, the Greenspan Commission made it into an art form of slush money. Today, we’re talking in the trillions.

There is all sorts of interesting behavior on the part of the guilty. Some, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan believe that we should return Social Security to the pay-as-you-go system, when he was one of the committee members that changed it into a “partial reserve” system. A system that was supposed to invest the surplus wisely instead of stealing it for selfish purposes. Now he says things like “we’ve enjoyed this extra revenue for years.”

In fact, it was Social Security’s having to draw small amounts from its trust fund several years in a row that caused the Reagan Administration to appoint the Greenspan Commission in the first place. Recession and high unemployment of the late Seventies and early Eighties caused Congress to go ballistic because Social Security required some of the General Fund money they wanted to spend elsewhere. They always go nutsey when this happens. They start acting like a bank getting upset because you might want to withdraw from your savings account. Telling everyone in town that you must be “in trouble” and about to go under.

The same thing happened a few years ago when Medicare had to draw $3 billion from its trust fund because unscrupulous doctors had been double billing the system and they still talk about Medicare being “in trouble” even though it holds $249 billion in its trust. Money they stole.

It also happened when the Department of Transportation told John Kasich’s House Budget Committee, in 1997, that it was going to need all of the $27 billion in trust in order to repair Interstate Highways. The DOT drew $5 billion and Congress went bananas, immediately putting an additional four cent tax on gasoline. A tax that’s still in effect, but has brought the Highway Trust Fund back up to today’s $32 billion. More loot.

Social Security is certainly the largest entitlement slush fund that the pirates plunder, but it isn’t the only one. Last year, fiscal 2000, the federal government had a $237 billion surplus. $87 billion was an income tax overcharge. $149.8 billion was stolen from entitlements. Social Security was $94.4 billion of this last figure.

If you’ve been able to follow this so far, then you’re ready for the big one. You are ready for the money laundering scheme hatched by Clinton but about to be continued by our new President George W. Bush. The scheme to pay down the “available” National Debt with your retirement and other entitlement money. Possibly the real quid-pro-quo that Clinton got from Marc Rich, the expert in money laundering.

See: The Oligarchy Speaks