The U.S. Government Budget Deficit Scam

By: Richard_Daughty

I am constantly amazed at the number of people who think that a budget deficit is the same thing as the total federal deficit, which it ain't.

Actually, I remember one time early in my career where I was so desperate to cover up the results of my own incompetence that I tried to exploit this confusion with a "budget deficit" scam of my own, and it seemed to work for almost a month!

I called it "unanticipated deficit", which was not exactly a lie like the other lies I'd told my bosses over the years.

Running though my Personnel File, we can see a long list of lies that have made their way into my file, like the ones I told about how, yes, I knew what I was doing, and yes, I am trained and educated to do what I am hired to do.

There's another one where I am lying and saying no, I am not goofing off all the time or sneaking off to play golf, and then there's this other one where I lied and said no, I do not think I am smarter than everyone else just because I am buying gold, silver and oil and they aren't, even though I kept telling them to buy them because the evil Federal Reserve is creating So Freaking Much Money (SFMM) that inflation in prices is guaranteed, and how I think that their attitude constitutes stupidity, and that they ought to be fired before they cause any more damage.

The most embarrassing lie in my Personnel File is when I said no, I did not leer lasciviously at Miss Lundell's long, luscious legs with my tongue hanging out, nor did I offer her fifty bucks to let me lick her ankles, no matter WHAT dozens of lying eyewitnesses say they saw, and/or heard, nor what the lying security cameras caught on tape, either.

My argument was, "Is the inadequacy of your new-hire screening process my fault?" I mean, if they had asked me, "Are you some kind of weirdo, emotionally-stunted, deviant creep who is going to spend an inordinate amount of company time harassing the other employees to buy gold, silver and oil as some panicky defense against the inflation and ruination caused by the Federal Reserve creating so much excess money and/or flirting with the female employees?" I would have admitted "Well, sure, kind of."

But they didn't ask! And apparently, it is important to know this stuff beforehand! My wife is, too, upset at this same error, and is constantly complaining, "If only I had known before I married you!" that I was, in summary, the very antithesis of everything she wanted, or could even tolerate except for short periods of time, in a husband.

So my almost-lie of an "unanticipated deficit" was derived from taking my department's actual loss, and subtracting from it the projected loss that was shown in my initial budget, which would result in a lower number that I could use as my "deficit."

Thus, my Fabulous Mogambo Plan (FMP) was to use this "unanticipated deficit" statistic until I could figure out something to, hopefully, salvage my career, which was in flames, and what was not in flames, was in tatters, and probably going to burst into flames soon.

And if my boss stuck those Quarterly Reports under my nose, I would say, "Whoa! Hold on! My figures show that my unanticipated deficit is less than the loss already in the budget, so something must be wrong in the accounting department! You need, if you want my opinion, to fire all those liars and morons and then start over, fresh, not even looking at any of today's tainted documents, blighted reports, corrupted files, printouts, spreadsheets, interoffice memos or that stupid Qualified Opinion of some stupid auditors that I never even met, so how could I have been 'uncooperative' and 'evasive'?"

Well, like I said, the scam didn't last that long, but did cause a lot of confusion and name-calling before the whole thing fell apart on me.

But the government gets away with this kind of lying all the time! For instance, as recently as October 15, 2010, the government was still insisting that the "deficit" for fiscal year 2010 was only $1.3 trillion, which is such a horrifically large number that it has momentarily made me forget what I was going to say, but at the last second I remembered that I was going to make the point that the national debt, measured between October 1, 2009 and October 1, 2010 to coincide with the federal budget year, increased by more than $1.7 trillion!

A $400 billion difference that somehow gets "lost" when people talk about "the deficit"! Wow! We're Freaking Doomed (WFD)!

Doomed, that is, unless, of course, we (meaning you and me) buy gold, silver and oil stocks as protection against the raging inflation that will result from the Federal Reserve creating enough money to buy all of this humongous, staggering, suffocating load of new debt, and then it becomes, "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron’s, The Daily Reckoning, and other fine publications.

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