Borrowing a slogan from the Bahamas and changing the last word from Commercia to Probitas we have; “Give up Piracy, Take up Honesty,” a slogan extremely appropriate to conditions in America today where there are so many crucial issues it’s almost impossible to list them all. It seems we’re standing on the brink of disaster, the new cutting edge.

The head of our Central Bank, the man in charge of regulating other banks, in a statement and question session before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress recently described the situation as a “conundrum” and ended up recommending that the government return to “accrual accounting” (Greenspeak for restore honesty – restituta probitas).

We’ve got a President who just appeared on prime time television from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was delivering a pep talk to some of our Special Forces troops and the country as well, telling us all about the progress in Iraq. As someone noted, it was a brilliant speech where Bush answered all of the questions that no one had asked.

And he does much the same thing while touring the country trying to raise support for the major platform of his second and final term in office, the plan to reform Social Security. Before pre-arranged echo chamber audiences, Bush repeats all of the same old booga-booga stories about the supplemental retirement insurance system having troubles in a far distant future that seems to go further and further into the Matrix every year that its trust fund increases.

And its trust fund, the combination of the Federal Old Age & Survivors Insurance and the Federal Disability Insurance trusts that we normally think of as one single trust, increases exponentially the more the government steals its excess payroll taxes, spends them elsewhere, and pretends that it merely “borrowed” or “invested” the money.

As a result, we have a self-perpetuating resource of bogus assets founded on fraud. The more the trust increases, the longer we are told it will support the system once surpluses stop, once payouts exceed inflow. The more surplus money the government steals, the more the trust fund grows, and thus, the longer the trust will last.

Two things make this the greatest and most unique economic fraud the world has ever seen:

The first is that if, for some highly unlikely or fabricated reason, the retirement and disability insurance program should ever be in a situation where benefit payouts exceed premium revenue, payroll tax income – the trust fund will continue to increase anyway. It will increase on the annual interest it collects that have already reached fantastic numbers because the fraud has been going for so long. Interest that is paid against the previous year’s closing balance. Interest that amounted to $80 billion last year alone, fiscal 2004, and will continue to grow no matter what happens. By 2042, this interest is liable to be in the trillions. And this is interest deposited at absolutely no cost to the government. All they do is dump more bogus bonds into the debt account. And the only reason they do that is to continue and substantiate the false story that they “borrowed” the real money in the first place, the preposterous story that same money can be both spent and saved.

Secondly, no matter what the pirates (expulses piratis) try to tell you about eventually paying off our skyrocketing national debt, how the government has never defaulted on its obligations, and how much they try to take credit for fulfilling the contracts we have with foreign nations, big pensions houses, and individuals who have loaned the government money – they cannot do this without taxpayer money – it’s the American taxpayers who make honest Treasury securities “the safest investment in the world.” They are the "safest" only becuase they're backed by every taxpayer in the country. In short, there is no one but the American taxpayer responsible and who will eventually be called upon to redeem any part of the nation’s debt, and at any one time there are not as many taxpayers in this country as you might think. They are quite a bit less than half the population.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a Fourth Estate that is supposed to include the media and watchdogs of investigative journalism who today seem more involved with soap opera tragedies and travesties, car chases, dieting, and weather warnings than any of the above. In fact, they can’t even turn to their own archives, records, and files of the things we all went through the last time Social Security was on the front burner.

It was four years ago this month, June 19, 2001, that former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill publicly announced that there were “no viable assets in the Social Security trust fund,” that he had no piles of money buried in the backyard of the Treasury. And the media picked up on that and went into a frenzy that lasted right up to September 11th. But during that summer of authorities and economists put on the spot about what would happen if Social Security ever had to “draw” on its trust we should have learned something.

They all said the same thing. They all said that if Social Security ever needs its trust fund holdings, the poor dears in Washington would be faced with either (1) raising taxes a bunch (2) borrowing even more money on the bond market (3) cutting budgeted programs, possibly including benefits, or any combination of these three normal and only elements of federal revenue. These would be the normal options even if there were no trust fund; i.e., the trust really is meaningless and useless to taxpayers just as Bush says.

The third option is really a money management function rather than fund raising. It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. And legitimate borrowing is really just a tax on our future, a credit card option that puts the payoff on the shoulders of future taxpayers. It all comes back to taxpayer responsibility. The very same people who in large part gave the pirates surpluses in the first place.

Now that the issue is up again, you would think that the members of the Fourth Estate would be able to hit the ground running. But no, they seem to have forgotten everything that happened in the summer four years ago. And it should make you think a lot about the position of these highly paid people. For example, if Katie Curric makes more than $14 million a year for what she does and pays all of her annual payroll taxes by January third, what do you suppose the other talking heads are knocking down? Do you think that they’re on the side of the people or the pirates?

Just a few days ago, we had editorial columnists from major newspapers like the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, and even the Christian Science Monitor saying that the government’s spending our retirement money on other programs is justifiable because if we don’t let them do it, they’ll just go out and borrow more money from China, Japan, and so forth, increasing our horrendous deficits.

How’s that for financial advice, responsibility, honesty and holding our elected representatives financially responsible?

There is also the very real possibility that Social Security is now on the front burner for no reason other than the fact that due to the economy and job situation payroll tax surpluses have been decreasing. Social Security's portion has dropped from a surplus donation of $98.7 billion in fiscal 2001, to $71.1 billion last year, fiscal 2004. And this year, it seems to be going even lower. In other words, the pirates could want reform only to raise the booty.

Expulsis Piratis, Restituta Probitus.