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Debtors prison

By David Schlosser, candidate for U.S. Congress

Week of 15^th October 2006

On the campaign trail, I get a lot of quizzical looks when I tell people that the Federal government should use the same accounting standards that it requires of business.  Last August, USA TODAY detailed the difference between the keeping books for business and the Federal government.  Instead of a $318 billion budget deficit in 2005, under the government’s accounting rules, the Federal budget deficit as measured by business accounting rules was actually $3.5 trillion for that single year.

In other words, the disastrous implications of a $318 billion gap between what the government takes from you in taxes and what it spends was actually ten times worse.

Now that we’re in election season, President Bush announced that the deficit is only $250 billion.  The Senate Budget Committee's ranking Democrat, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, reminded Americans that Bush is tapping Social Security revenue to help cover the deficit through off-budget borrowing. Accounting for that, Conrad said, would have added $550 billion to the deficit last fiscal year.

Playing shell games with the Federal budget is politics as usual.  During the years of the first Federal budget surplus in anyone’s memory, your elected officials assured you that the last term of the Clinton presidency was $559 billion in the black.  In reality, if the Federal government had to report its finances the same way Boeing, General Electric, and your employer have to report their finances, we were $484 billion in the red (and that doesn’t even count the projected shortfall in Social Security and Medicare obligations).

As a thought exercise, consider how the stock market and the Federal government might punish a company (like Enron, Tyco, or Worldcom) with a $1 trillion accounting discrepancy.  Then, ask yourself how the Federal government justifies keeping one set of books for your consumption and a different set of books for the green eyeshade people.  It’s a justification so terrifying in its banality that you should probably take a seat.

According to a May 2006 letter from Clay Johnson III, then-acting director of the Office of Management Budget, retirement programs do “not represent a legal obligation because Congress has the authority to increase or reduce social insurance benefits at any time.”  The Federal budget does not account for the cost of future pensions and medical care for federal retirees and military personnel, or the demographic train wreck of Social Security and Medicare, because Congress does not have to fund those programs.

In other words, because Congress can take away the health care and financial support it’s promised you, it does not have to account for those obligations.  That, and if you knew that the government’s real deficit since 1997 is more than $40 trillion – nearly four times the size of the entire U.S. economy last year – you might start expecting Congress to do something about it.

Congress protects itself by showing you the set of books it wants you to see, rather than the set of books you need to see.  This is how candidates for public office can describe a departmental budget growing at four percent a year, rather than five percent a year, as “budget cutting.”  It’s also why there’s no accountability in Federal budgets: bureaucrats and legislators measure the value of government by how much it costs, rather than what it accomplishes.

We spend billions of dollars more every year so the U.S. Department of Education can oversee a tragic public school monopoly that makes our children dumber every year they’re trapped in it.

We spend billions of dollars more every year so the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services can report that more Americans lack insurance, health insurance premiums grow faster than inflation, more people – including children – are obese, and we experience embarrassing differences in average life spans and infant mortality rates for Americans of different races.

We spend billions of dollars more every year so the U.S. Department of Agriculture can promote a “food pyramid” based on politically manipulated corporate subsidies rather than sound nutrition science.

We spend billions of dollars more every year so the U.S. Department of Interior can keep fighting a decade-long court mandate that it pay Native Americans the trust funds it owes them.

We spend billions of dollars more every year so the U.S. Department of Transportation can report on more congestion, longer commutes, worse airline service, and the sinkhole of Amtrak’s budget while leaving unspent billions of dollars in highway and airport funds so the Federal government can hide the true size of the budget deficit.

I’ve listened to many citizens on the campaign trail who shake their heads and tell me, “Imagine how bad it would be if we didn’t spend all that money.”  It never occurs to them that the only demonstrable Federal success in the past generation was when we stopped spending money.  For ten years, welfare reform has moved people into the job market, reduced the incidence of poverty among children in single-parent households, and improved economic opportunities in urban centers that the Federal government’s “war on poverty” turned into wastelands and war zones.

If spending billions more every year, year after year, fails to solve the problems we share, I believe it’s time to stop.  Ben Franklin defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  By forcing the Federal government to comply with accounting standards that reveal the true scope of the obligations we’ve made, and by passing a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we can finally start setting priorities and evaluating the value of Federal programs by what they achieve, rather than what they cost.

It’s time to ask yourself what Ben Franklin would say if you expect that sending your incumbent back to Congress in November will make a difference in how Congress spends your money – and your children’s and grandchildren’s money.  Because not knowing about a $40 trillion accounting discrepancy is insane.

# # #

Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress David Schlosser, 38, lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he is a public relations manager for a global microprocessor company and has been a part-time instructor in the School of Communications at Northern Arizona University.  He brings nearly a decade of political experience to his campaign for Congress, and is a graduate of Trinity University and the University of Texas.  His wife, Anne, is a corporate training and development professional.  For more information about Schlosser and his campaign for Arizona’s First Congressional District, visit www.SchlosserForCongress.com.

Authorized and paid for by Schlosser for Congress, Scott Gude, Treasurer

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