Articles & Blogs - US Commentary

User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 

Interpreting Obama deficit-numbers, using the “50% rule”

During the U.S. presidential campaign, I admit to being briefly caught up in“Obama-mania” - and actually wondered aloud if the lingering stench hovering over Washington was about to blow away.

That brief bout of insanity quickly passed, and I soon absorbed the fact that only the “brand name” of the U.S. government was changing –and the stench wasn't going anywhere.

Politics for the last thirty years has been a game of determining who is the most plausible liar, with the winner getting elected. This is true throughout the world's democracies, and especially true in the United States – which has the largest, most-refined, and most-successful propaganda machine the world has ever known.

What makes this situation doubly-dire for Americans is that their (only) two political parties have become enthusiastic co-conspirators. Indeed, covering up for each other's BIG LIES is arguably the only bipartisan endeavor which the Republicans and Democrats have been able to consistently agree upon year-after-year.

There are a number of BIG LIES in the U.S., however I'll confine myself to the BIG LIE which involves the U.S. debt/deficits. While these gross fabrications predate the “Bush years” (and the “Clinton years”), I will focus on this decade – with the proviso that the lying did not begin with George Junior.

When George Junior came to power at the end of 2000 (with considerable doubt as to whether he had actually been elected), the U.S. national debt stood at about $5.6 trillion dollars – a staggering total, and a HUGE problem, even at that stage. When he leaves office at the beginning of 2009 (and the 'dust settles'), the Obama regime will inherit a national debt of $11 trillion – give or take a hundred billion.

For further simplicity, let's back up to the end of September 2008, the end of the last FULL fiscal year where George Junior was the 'skipper' of the U.S.S. Titanic. At that time, the U.S. national debt was estimated at a mere $10 trillion. During his eight years of economic futility, Bush nearly doubled the U.S.national debt – increasing it by $4.35 trillion.

Here, however, is where we come to the lying. While it is none other than the U.S. Treasury Department which assures us that the U.S. national debt increased by $4.35 trillion during the eight “Bush years”, if you add up the seven annual deficits, and the one (supposed) “surplus”, you get a total of only $2 trillion.

To find more historical information, visit The Public Debt Historical Information archives.

Source: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm

The “annual deficits” recorded by the Bush regime amount to less than 50% of the annual increase in debt. Put another way, during the entire Bush presidency, his annual budgets were more fiction than fact.

The lies get both more outrageous (and hilarious) when you actually “open the books” of the Government Accountability Office (the “GAO”). It is none other than the U.S. government's own accountants who willfully perpetuate these lies, year after year.

The “outrageous” part is that they make very little effort to hide their lies. On the GAO's own “balance sheet” they show: the “on budget” calculations, the “off budget” calculations, and the (net) “official deficit”.

Readers will hopefully note the immediate similarity between the U.S. government's “on budget” and “off budget” accounting, and Wall Street's “on balance sheet” and “off balance sheet” accounting. Regretfully, I did not invest the time to find out which of these fraud-factories gave the other the idea to engage in this transparent, sham-accounting.

There is ONE significant difference between Wall Street accounting and U.S. government accounting. Wall Street used the “off balance sheet” sham to FIRST hide the enormous leverage these gambling addicts built into their business models, and now use it to hide their trillions in gambling losses.

Conversely, the Bush regime (and the Clinton regime before it) use their “off budget” accounting to ADD large sums of money to the U.S. government's bottom line – money that does not exist.

How can it be that the world's largest economy, with infinite resources to do its accounting, is so negligent in its accounting practices that a significant chunk of its annual budget is NOT subject to any line-by-line accounting?

During only the eight years of accounting fraud which took place during the Bush regime, GAO fraud-artists “added” $1.4 TRILLION to the U.S. “bottom line” - money which never existed, and discrepancies for which no one has ever accounted.

If we subtract those fraudulent figures and look at only the “on budget” accounting, we get a total of $3.3 trillion in deficits - still well off the truth, but at least bearing some faint resemblance to reality.

Even after all these lies, there is still a $1.1 TRILLION gap! Over one trillion dollars which is new, real U.S. government debt for which there is no “on budget” OR “off budget” accounting. When you take away the“on budget” accounting and the “off budget” accounting (which obviously SHOULD represent 100% of the total debt), what do you have left? Presumably it's the amount which the Bush regime has embezzled from the U.S. government for themselves and their “friends”.

You have not heard one word from the Democratic Party about this glaring and blatant fraud, and the apparent embezzlement of $1.1 TRILLION during the years of the Bush regime– and you never will.

This was “business as usual” in Washington before Bush got elected, and it will be “business” as usual after Bush is gone (but NOT forgotten).

President-elect Obama has warned Americans that they likely face “several years” of “budget deficits” in excess of $1 trillion per year. If we “translate” this lie using the U.S. government's own metrics, we understand that what Obama really meant with that statement is that Americans can expect annual deficits well in excess of $2 TRILLION per year. But don't hold your breath waiting for anyone in the Obama administration to tell you how much THEY plan on embezzling.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed