Besides retirement and health care insurance, the Federal Government has at least two other insurance programs that should be of particular importance to the average taxpayer today. These are the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC).

You may not live in a floodplain or work for a company that has a pension plan, but you are going to pay for these programs anyway because they are in exactly the same “trust fund” position as Social Security and Medicare. They are all part of the 144 trust funds that come and go from the “Intragovernmental Holdings” (IH) portion of our horrendous national debt and you are held responsible for keeping this fraud moving along.

For years, people who wanted or were required by lending institutions to have flood insurance on their homes or businesses have paid premiums to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that operates the NFIP, the largest flood insurer in the country. Many times it’s the only place people can get flood insurance.

Of course, many homeowners cannot afford the average $350 per year NFIP charges for this insurance and others who live in coastal barrier areas are disallowed because the risk is too high. It’s not a program for the poor.

Likewise, companies that could afford the premiums also paid into the government’s PBGC to insure their pension plans to some extent.

During fiscal 2005, the government listed these two insurance programs with assets of $784 million for NFIP and $12,997 million ($12.9 billion) for PBGC.

Of course, that was before hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma visited the Gulf Coast and it was before the big auto manufacturers like General Motors and Ford added their pension programs to the pile that the PBGC was supposed to cover along with some major airlines.

As of this month, January of 2006, the PBGC is $28 billion in the hole and FEMA’s flood insurance is stalling settlements to homeowners and businesses that want their coverage money in order to start rebuilding on the Gulf Coast or to put down payments on homes or construction somewhere else.

The trouble is that over the years the Beltway Bandits walked off with the premium payments as fast as they came in and there is no money or liquid asset on hand to pay these people, not even certificates of deposit (CDs) at a bank where they might be drawing a little more than simple interest. They didn’t even save the premium payments in a mattress.

Instead, there are piles of “special” nonmarketable and nonnegotiable bonds in accounts labeled “trust funds” that are trusts in name only. The government put these there when they pretended to “borrow” the premium payments – when they gambled that there would never be a major disaster or failing economy that would put undo stress on their poorly run insurance businesses. When they thought they were safe spending the premium money and had this “investment” fairy tale to tell.

These are the same kind of bonds that President Bush waved in the air and called “useless” and “meaningless” for Social Security Insurance. They’re the same bonds that the pirates have used to set up “gift accounts” for the CIA and State Department so they could pay the “coalition of the willing.” The same bonds that they dump into their own retirement plan every September to bring that account out of the red ink it has been running every previous month of the fiscal year. The same bonds that they use to provide their own health insurance plan, Federal Employees Life & Health insurance, that doesn’t even bother with any receipts at all, but increases with money spent.

These are the same bonds that at least two presidents and other authorities have been telling us can be redeemed or cashed-in only with taxpayer money, whether it’s from today’s taxes or future taxes in the form of legitimate borrowing under contract with countries still willing to loan us money.

Those of you who might feel it’s bombastic, inappropriate, or impolite to use words like “crooks-pirates-Beltway Bandits” and so forth, might note that the NFIP and PBGC are listed, along with Social Security and Medicare, under the IH portion of the national debt. More than forty percent of the entire national debt holding nothing but these same nonmarketable bonds (see trust fund list).

What stands out as a major clue is the fact that the few real trust funds the government manages, those that are dominated by their own Thrift Savings Plan, are listed under investor loans or “Debt Held by the Public” because the *&%# don’t want to call attention to them, don’t know where else to list them, and because these have assets that can be sold on the open market.

It’s also interesting that the $65 billion or so that is held by these real trust funds is considered “not subject to the debt limit.” On January 26th, we exceeded the $8.184 debt ceiling without the roof falling in. These real trust funds are the reason why.

It means that the government still has more than $65 billion to go before making a few noises and raising the debt ceiling another trillion or so. What’s more, they can extend it even further by spending the real assets in these accounts to run the government another month or more after that. It’s like eating chicken instead of steak or having “leftovers” for awhile.

The only difference between the NFIP and the PBGC scams is that it’s not the “Pay-It-Again Sam” scam that applies to Social Security and Medicare. A system where America's workers might just as well have walked up to the U.S. Treasury with bags of money, plunked that money down and said; “Here, sell me some debt. And don’t forget to add annual interest so I’ll have even more to pay you back.”

This time, most of America's taxpayers are going to cover someone else who got robbed, those who believed they were buying real insurance. The government will borrow money from China and Japan to make limited payments for flood damage, putting it on your future taxes and causing the deficit to increase, all while telling us it’s Katrina’s fault. Meanwhile, they are doing nothing to improve the levees that caused the flood damage in New Orleans and were supposed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.

Before Bush visited the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Agency in South Florida, NOAA had reported sustained winds over New Orleans during Katrina at 95 miles per hour, barely a Category 2.

Note: In this article, I’m actually being kind to the government by not mentioning the Federal Employees Retirement & Disability trust fund (the second largest trust in IH), the Employees Life Insurance trust, the Federal Employees Life & Health trust (that never has any receipts at all), the Military Retirement trust, the Veterans Life Insurance Fund, or the many other insurance businesses that must all be covered with taxpayer money (see the IH trust fund list).