“Voodoo Economics” and Social Insecurity
The ENRON Corporation was supposed to be an energy company, supplying the nation, in creative ways with the energy we need to heat our homes and cook our food. As it turns out, most of their creative energies went into cooking the books. Thousands of workers and investors saw their fortunes and their pensions wiped out, while the nation heaped well-deserved scorn on the perpetrators. However, the accounting chicanery of ENRON is small beer compared to the accounting trickery practiced by the federal govmint.
It is sad enough that the President can “boast” that he has reduced this year's deficit to a mere $163 billion. Alas, even this boast is a lie. As reported by, the real deficit is a staggering $497 billion. Nearly half a trillion dollars. How is this done? Scott Burns in Sunday's Dallas Morning News puts it this way:
The September statement shows that the "on-budget" ran a deficit of $344.3 billion in fiscal 2007. The "off-budget" ran a surplus of $181.5 billion. (The off-budget is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and other programs with trust funds.) Add the two figures and you get the "unified budget," that $162.8 billion.
But that's only part of the story.
