Jimmy Buffett was wrong when he sang; “Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years too late. The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothing to plunder, I’m an over forty victim of fate, arriving too late, arriving too late.”

Well Jimmy, you’re not too late. You’re just in the wrong profession. The cannons still thunder, and there’s plenty to plunder. All you have to do is throw in with the federal government. They could even use your poetic talents to spin more propaganda. You could “rhythm and rhyme” for Uncle Scam.

Picture this. There’s a line of people, each carrying a large bag of money. The line stretches from the front of the U.S. Treasury, around the side of the building, and off into infinity. At the front of the building, Uncle Sam sits at a table dressed in his full red, white, and blue costume, top hat and all. One by one, the people step up to the table, plunk down their bags of hard earned cash, and say – HERE. SELL ME SOME DEBT. AND DON’T FORGET TO ADD ANNUAL INTEREST SO I’LL HAVE EVEN MORE TO PAY YOU BACK.

Do you think that’s funny, ridiculous, and impossible, that it couldn’t happen in our representative republic? Well, think again. Except for standing in line in the District of Corruption, the above is an accurate description of the greatest, most outrageous, economic scam any government has ever pulled on its own citizens short of coming into our homes, putting a gun to our heads, and walking off with our family possessions.

Currently, this swindle stands at $3.2 trillion and growing by the minute. The entire Intragovernmental Holdings (IH) side of our $7.8 trillion national debt is fraudulent. Social Security is merely the largest single program caught in this scam currently holding $1.7 trillion in debt markers taxpayers are expected to someday redeem, to someday pay again, a second time, plus interest. At that time, workers will still be paying their normal payroll taxes while they make this second payment. It’s double taxation plain and simple and it’s already happening with other accounts.

Dozens of other programs are caught in this same trap, all in the same boat as the guaranteed supplemental retirement system that we’ve paid for. These others include Military retirement, Veteran’s benefits, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, as well as gas taxes that were supposed to go towards highway maintenance. Goods and services people bought and are “entitled” to receive.

We got into this mess by giving the government more money than it needs in order to provide these goods and services. With Social Security alone, we provided more in payroll taxes than the system required and we still do. In the last five years, these surpluses amounted to $94.5 billion in fiscal 2000 – a high of $98.7 billion in 2001 – $88.9 billion in 2002 – $81.8 billion in fiscal 2003 – and $71.1 billion last year, fiscal 2004 while the pirates were telling us that “surpluses are gone.”

They’re gone all right. Vanished, spent, never to be seen again. And we have no chance of ever getting that money back, ever seeing it again, but we keep giving them more new money. Uncle Scam is great at double entendres, words or expressions that have at least two meanings, one of which is evil as hell.

The pirates use these double meanings all over the place. They’ve got “trust funds” that are nothing more than debt markers, or bookkeeping entries like Norm had at Cheers. They’ve invented “securities” that are truly meaningless or worthless as at least two of our presidents have admitted – worthless to everyone but the pirates. And they’ve piled all of this in a category of the national debt that they call “Intragovernmental Holdings” which is so named just to make people believe that they’re going to take care of this mess themselves, somehow, someday far, far in the distant future. Somewhere in the Matrix.

You can and should take all of this and put it under one word, one classification. That word is FRAUD, a system of deceit and deception that belongs in the world of Harry Potter and his adventures in fantasyland, not in our government. It might be worth a good laugh if it wasn’t for the fact that the audience keeps throwing more and more money on the stage, seemingly in appreciation of these criminal antics.

Far too many have bought into the belief that the same money can be both spent and saved. The word “trust” is the most outlandish double entendre of them all.

We could put an end to it through revolution and making the pirates walk the plank. But even then, the pirates would use it as a forum, just walk to the end of the board, turn around, and start telling us that they’re the only ones who know how to “fix” the problem, lecturing us on what an enormously complex and difficult problem it is, and how we should spare them because they’re the only ones who fully understand the problem and can develop the remedy. Far too many believe we need them to tell us what to do.

Anyway, we’ve been through all that before haven’t we? Remember the contract with America , the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, or the years of fruitless debate over lock-boxes? What have you got today that you can point to and say “this is better,” this corrected something?

If you saw someone writhing in pain on the grass, gasping for breath, with his or her left arm numb, would you rush up, pull out your pen knife and start performing triple by-pass open heart surgery? Of course you wouldn’t.

Then why are we rushing in with all sorts of proposals and remedies to fix something that isn’t broken, doesn’t need immediate surgery, and at most may need adjustment sometime in the future? And Social Security is just one of the patients that should be under observation and diagnosis.

If there’s one thing we all have, it’s time to be rational about remedies. And the first step is to fully understand, deeply and in detail, exactly what the problem is. We haven’t even begun to reach that stage. We’re just scratching the surface.