First – the SEC

In an article titled "Plan Aims to Stop Fraud in Business" the writer, Laurence McQuillan, reports that President Bush intends to give the Securities and Exchange Commission "$20 million this year for 100 new agents."

Maybe my math is screwy, but that seems to mean $200,000 for each new agent. Assuming that all of them are going to get the same starting salary, how is this possible? What are we paying for with our taxpayer dollars? Are we hiring Enron and WorldCom experts?

No doubt, there's some administrative cost involved. Personnel will have to find these new geniuses and might even pay commission to head hunters, but if we knock off 10 percent for that service, it still leaves an exorbitant amount. Is this money for each agent to have a staff of secretaries, researchers, deputy agents, and assistant deputy agents?

I think we better review the newly found heaviest element called "Administratium."

Second—30 year bonds

In the upper left hand corner of this same front page, USA Today reports "T-Bond, 30 year yield—5.41" which I take to mean annual interest percentage or "yield."

What grabs me here is that I heard that the US Treasury withdrew the 30 year bond on February 15th of this year. The bond is no longer available after that date, which was all part of President Bush's plan to pay off the national debt (at least one side of it) in the next ten years of so with our retirement, health care, and other entitlement overpayments. He intended to pay off "available" debt and didn't want more long term bonds hanging around. You do remember that pipedream started by Clinton, don't you?

I've been wrong before, so I decided to check. When I got home, I emailed the Treasury and asked them. Here's their immediate response:

Dear Ed,

The 30-year was discontinued at the quarterly refunding meeting in November 2001. The 30-year bond was not offered in February 2002; and there are currently no plans to offer any more 30-year bonds or 30-year inflation indexed bonds.

Thank you for your interest in Treasury securities. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Jennifer K.
Customer Service Specialist

So what's going on with USA Today? Where are they getting information on rates for a bond that doesn't exist? Is it just a typo? That 5.41 percent interest rate would seem more appropriate to the 10 year bond, the longest term bond now available. Did somebody tell them the rate long term bonds are getting today, and they just interpreted that to mean it applied to the old 30 year bond? There certainly can't be any changes in interest rates for the people holding 30 year bonds purchased before February because their rate was etched in stone when they contracted with the government.

This is not responsible journalism folks. I keep telling you that you can't trust the numbers media people use. Most of the time, they are getting their information second hand from politicians or other hearsay. It's the Mayberry News Syndrome, direct from Goober's Garage or Floyd's barber shop.

It just proves the old axiom: "Everything you see or hear in the news seems true—except for those things with which you have intimate knowledge." And darn it, I've been following the national debt for almost ten years now. Surely, there's somebody in a news organization the size of USA Today that knows how to check with the US Treasury.

By the way, have you noticed that the Debt Clock is back in Times Square, New York City? They should never have believed that the government was "paying down" the national debt. When they took the clock down, my wife complained that they could have left it up and started running it backwards in order to show any reduction and give us something to cheer about. But, of course, that would never have happened. The debt has always gone up, every year since 1969.

In this regard, I think that the best year we ever had was fiscal 2000 when the government actually threw $230 billion against one side of the debt and, overall, it only went up $18 billion. That should give you some idea of how much they stole from Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements to make the debt continue to rise in spite of their effort. The government's Enron style double bookkeeping to hide debt. Let's put them in jail.