Understanding a Government Budget
Deborah Venable
02/26/11
It’s
hard to survive a fair fight when you can’t see what you are fighting, but it
is especially hard to win an unfair fight so blinded. Watching the unrest that has erupted in just the last week or so
over new state leaders trying to trim and/or balance their state budgets in the
face of well orchestrated, mostly union resistance to where they were
suggesting the cuts, I was reminded of one of those “elephants in the room” as
my brother so aptly put it in his article, Blue Smoke and Mirrors, written back in 2003. Since he was far more intelligent and
educated than I, yet was willing to admit his shortcomings, I can do no
less. While I too can handle an
accounting ledger, perhaps better than most politicians we elect today, when
the zeros keep piling up on the deficit side, it is hard to see the forest for
the trees so to speak.
Now, it is bad enough that we have a president in the White House, who would be kicked out of any other job he might hold, based purely on job performance alone, who never had to prove his Constitutional eligibility for his office, and who now compounds his mistakes like a crooked banker compounds interest on bad investments, but now we should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that no government entity below him can ever be trusted to tell us the truth. Nor can we count on the fourth estate to be truthful while covering for such total corruption as exists in such governments.
Anybody
who puts a lot of stock in budgetary fights, whether they be played out on the
floor of Congress, in the backrooms beyond, or from the pens and keyboards of
those bean counters and reporters, who think they know exactly what is going on
in government accounting, is simply deluding himself. To say that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing is
putting it far too mildly. Over the
last few years, though, the problem has been greatly exacerbated as more and
more people are waking up to two facts.
Governments lie, and the media doesn’t even try to keep them honest.
One
more fact of the human condition that we must also consider is that people are
controlled by their pocketbooks. This
is true no matter how bad it sounds. We
are largely a fiscal animal, whether or not we try to maintain some sort of
moral compass. If someone knows how to
manipulate a society’s fiscal well-being, they are most of the way down the
road of corrupting most of that society.
With enough complicit secret keepers, by the time the real facts get
sorted out, it is too late to save enough truth to matter.
Understanding
a government budget accepts the fact that no one can be expected to understand
something they have so little knowledge about.
Each and every government in this country has been sufficiently
corrupted so that no one has enough of the facts to formulate a complete
understanding of the fiscal health of said governments, or the people to which
they are supposed to answer. Alarmed
yet? You should be.
Governments
need money to operate. Sure. That’s a given, but they need much more
money to control as completely as all governments want to. Anyone who believes that our governments,
local, state, and federal, operate solely on the money they collect from
taxpayers is woefully uninformed.
Governments do not operate in the same way that businesses and
individuals have to in reporting income vs. expenses on a balance sheet. They can manipulate their net worth any way
they see fit, and there is little you or I can do about it. Moral governments are not supposed to
profit, (hence the key words, “balanced budget”) but profit they do – all the
while claiming to be “broke.” Other times
they may claim a “surplus” which may or may not exist, and then proceed to further
control the minds of the people who can keep the main players in power or send
them packing accordingly. In other
words, it is truly a shell game.
While
we are all drawn into the muck of deciding what we can afford, (we, meaning
government) we lose sight of the real issue – what government is supposed to do
or not do. Our federal government, for
instance, was NOT established to “take care of the people” as so many seem to
think now. It was established to
represent our interests to the rest of the world, and protect those interests
from foreign threats and domestic criminals.
That’s about it in a nutshell.
It is not supposed to control the state and local governments beneath it
by investing federal dollars in them, or withholding those dollars from states
and localities that do not wish to allow such control. Likewise, state and local governments are
not supposed to infringe on basic individual rights outlined in the
Constitution any more than the federal government is supposed to be able
to. Meanwhile, the only question most
folks want answered is how can we afford the next government “program”?
Let
me go way out on a limb here and say that we (any government) CAN afford
anything we are stupid enough to say we want.
That
is simply because the richest entities in this great country ARE governments
and government entities.
While
it can be made to look, on paper, like state, local, and especially the federal
government are literally going broke, nothing could be further from the
truth. There. I’ve said it. Let me
quickly follow that up with this – “going broke” means that there is more on
the credit side than the debit side of the balance sheet. Okay, that won’t mean a lot to anyone who
has never trudged through the totally boring, confusing, and mundane subject of
double entry bookkeeping, but it IS a much too simple way of explaining the
whole thing. So, why do I say that we
can afford anything? Because budgeting
is not boiled down to a true balance sheet in government accounting. Pure and simple.
Whether
or not our foreign enemies know this, as they banter on about stripping our
pristine credit rating and replacing our dollar, I can’t be sure, but it
doesn’t really matter because they would only be slitting their own throats to
do this. The American dollar has
propped up and financed so much of the world for the last hundred years or so
that rejecting the value it represents would be tantamount to the financial
ruin of everyone – except us. That’s
right – I said, “except us.” Oh, I don’t
doubt that the American people would suffer somewhat if that were to happen,
but it sure as hell wouldn’t be the end of us!
I’ve
written reams about the debt crisis and mortgaging our progeny’s future, how we
should not raise the debt ceiling (and we shouldn’t!) and how we need to learn
to live within our means – that’s all true.
That’s all just good old common sense.
The fact that our government even considered securing “loans” from
foreign governments, (especially to the tune of our “debt” to China) is
absurd! What Americans should realize
is that we have done all this, including our ridiculous trade imbalance, in the
name of diplomacy. Anyone in the world,
(especially and including our own stupid citizens), who hates America, does so
in total ignorance of what the world would have become without us, and with a
very blind eye to history before the preceding 234 years.
What
other country on the face of the earth can wave a checkbook at a problem
anywhere else in the world and change it?
That is precisely what America can and does do on a regular basis. That is the main reason we are hated. It is called, envy. Though our current president is trying with
all his might to squeeze the life out of the golden goose, (because he hates us
too) he won’t succeed. He isn’t
supposed to succeed. His purpose is to
distract. His purpose is to create
chaos and crisis. His purpose is to
turn American citizens against each other.
His party has been infiltrated with archaic, long-failed philosophies
that can never work in this country, although he and his minions are too
arrogant to realize it. He flaunts the
wealth of this country and the privileges he has been afforded in the face of
friends and enemies alike, and doesn’t seem to even care.
Back
to the balance sheet and the whole government budget thing – the people of this
country are all wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, whether or not they know
it. The holdings may be in the name of
government and government entities, but we are the government. If you take stock of every piece of land,
every building or improvement, every assigned mineral right on that land,
investments by government entities in the largest corporations on earth, and
every bit of income that has been earned on those investments from the
beginning of the country, you might begin to grasp my meaning. Governments own the most valuable, wealth
producing investments in the country, and those investments are in constant
earning mode.
So
why are we being told that governments are going broke, and our children’s
futures have been mortgaged? Well, why
do people who have plenty of money still borrow against their wealth for
expenditures they wish to make? Happens
all the time. “Credit” has been the way
to go for a long time now, hasn’t it?
The “buy on time” mindset is all a part of American life, and everyone
is quite used to it. Not just that, but
the percentage of the population that actually knows about government
investments is miniscule. The
discussion of the subject is taboo for politicians and government-controlled
media alike, so don’t expect an exposé anytime soon. Also, it creates a convenient way to hide the real bottom line
from the American people. Just one more
distraction.
So,
you can have a perfectly good portfolio of wealth and still end up ruining your
credit rating. Sadly, everyone in
today’s world is judged by that credit rating and how good they may look on
paper. That is the judgment we see
going on in governments in America right now.
Full faith and credit – that is the standard by which our dollars must
be judged. When we spread that faith
and credit thin, and it gets reported all over the world that we are so
“indebted” to other nations, it weakens the reliance on our dollars. The totally useless Federal Reserve pumps
more dollars into the economy by “selling” more credit, (something individual
states can’t do) which only makes us look less solvent. “Selling credit?” you might ask. “Don’t you mean buying credit?” No – credit is the product the Fed always
sells, and it only buys us more trouble – every time they do it! The “unreal” wealth that is credit is what
politicians can then manipulate like Monopoly money to control we, the people,
so we stay distracted – either happily distracted or unhappily distracted –
depending on how much of what we want we are actually getting.
Since
the Federal Reserve gets to determine the well being of our economy via the
manipulation of interest rates on the amount of money it prints, it is set up
to literally bankrupt the country anytime it wishes – or it can continue to
allow the growing debt and interest on it to choke Americans for years to come.
How
many times have you heard of someone, who was supposedly quite rich, but never
took care of his own finances, and one day woke up to the fact that an
accountant or money manager had stolen him blind and that he was virtually
bankrupt? It happens. You can bet a lot of distractions were going
on in those situations.
The
problem is that for too long we have allowed our government officials to be our
money managers. We have allowed the
government to take care of us, so-to-speak, to the point that we really have no
idea what is going on with the true wealth of America. We haven’t kept our eye carefully on the
ball of just what government is supposed to do and what it is NOT supposed to
do. We have shirked so much of our
individual responsibility that most folks will believe anything, (collectively
speaking of course.)
Government
is far too big. Too much government employment
exists at all levels. Government
employees who unionize and collectively bargain for their own benefit is
diametrically opposed to the values and principles of our republic the way it
was established. Too many people do not
understand or accept this. Currently,
we have a few principled politicians who are trying to point this out. They must do so by use of an income/expense
balance sheet to show that government spends too much money. Indeed, many of them may not realize just
how much hidden government wealth exists under those imbalanced balance sheets,
but you can bet the real power mongers in government know all too well. Trimming the size and scope of government is
an absolute necessity if we are to preserve freedom in America.
As
I have said all along, informed individuals can make a difference. If one isn’t informed, then the unfair fight
against collectivism is like accepting a blindfold before entering a combat
zone against a whole unit of opposing forces.
Being informed takes a lot of individual work and responsibility. While distractions can be a form of
recreation, they must not be allowed to keep us from the hard work ahead of us
if we are to save the republic.
My
dear brother, bless his heart, made a valiant effort in his article I
highlighted above, Blue Smoke and Mirrors, because he happened on some information that
he found very disturbing. He made
personal contact with one man he mentions, Walter Burien. My brother and I had many discussions on the
subject in the years preceding his death, because I had done the research back
then too. When I decided to see
whatever happened to Mr. Burien, I found a very interesting and quite current
video available at
this link,
which I implore you to watch. Set aside
a couple of hours for it and push through to the end if you possibly can. Don’t expect to be entertained, for this is
NOT a distraction. This is you, going
into battle without a blindfold, armed with factual information, but only if
you think it is important.
I
will leave the rest of the vast amount of research you should want to do to
you.