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If you spent more each month than you made and got deeper and deeper into debt, but had an asset equal to your debts, like a big expensive boat you never used, what would you do? If you were rational, you would sell the boat.

The U.S. government has spent more than it receives in tax revenue for most of the last 75 years, and, as a result, the national debt and the associated interest payments have gotten bigger and bigger. But what is not well known is that the U.S. government also has many trillions of dollars of assets, which may exceed the value of the debt. I say “may” because, in fact, no one knows because the government has no accurate balance sheet of what it owns and what it owes.

For instance, the federal government owns somewhere between 600 and 700 million acres of land, or about 30 percent of all U.S. land. But again, no one knows for certain if the federal government owns 630 million acres or 670 million acres or some other amount.

Private companies are required to produce accurate balance sheets for their stockholders, and, if they do not, their executives might be sent to jail.

We American citizens and taxpayers are the “stockholders” of our government, and hence we should expect and have the right to receive accurate accounting statements. It is a bit tiring to hear sanctimonious and hypocritical public officials say corporate managers should be punished for deliberate or even accidental accounting mistakes, when the most important legal entity for most Americans — the government — produces financial information so incomplete and inaccurate it would embarrass even an Enron accountant.

This issue of proper government accounting is important for many reasons.

As one example, the current debate about Social Security involves whether the government will raise taxes or cut benefits. The current system is a Ponzi scheme in which the taxes from the workers have been spent on both the current retirees and other government programs, and hence there is no money in the “trust fund.” If a nongovernment official set up such a scheme, he would (rightly) go to jail for fraud. Like all Ponzi schemes, the time on this one has run out as Americans live longer and have fewer children. To prevent this type of fraud in the future, Americans must move to individual trust accounts that cannot be raided by the politicians, whether managed by the government, or privately or some combination.

In the meantime, there is the multitrillion-dollar problem of the “transition” (or more correctly replacing funds taken from the trust accounts by the politicians) from the current fiscally unsound to a fiscally sound system. To take care of this “transition,”, there may be an alternative to either reducing benefits or increasing taxes, and that is for the government to begin selling assets, like land. However, before you can begin to sell your assets in a responsible manner, you must know what they are, which requires a correct government balance sheet.

PHILADELPHIA – National Public Radio program Justice Talking will host a debate on intelligent design and how to teach evolution in front of a live audience Tuesday, April 19, 2005 7:30 PM at The National Constitution Center, featuring Discovery Institute senior fellow Dr. Paul Nelson, a proponent of the theory of intelligent design, and philosopher Dr. Niall Shanks, a defender Read More ›

Bruce Chapman, a former US ambassador to the United Nations Organization in Vienna, is among some 100 diplomats and other leaders, endorsing the nomination of John Bolton to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.“I had the pleasure of working with John Bolton in the past and consider him an outstanding public servant who will Read More ›

Our national flirtation with the illusory benefits of “free” national health insurance corrodes our debate about improving the quality of health care in the United States. Partly because of the allure of this delusion of free or single-payer national health insurance, we are slowly ceding our medical service system to government mismanagement at patient and taxpayer expense. The most dangerous Read More ›

The state of Indiana ranks a lowly 40th in the number of homes with broadband Internet connections, but new legislation based in part on ideas from Discovery Institute and its “Technology and Democracy Project” could change that. The Indiana House of Representatives on April 11 passed a bill that would prohibit the regulation of broadband and other advanced services and Read More ›

With the weighty issues of Iraq, the war on terror, Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II occupying the minds of many Americans, I would like to discuss a lighter topic, one that is nonetheless still relevant to life in Seattle: canine waste matter.

That’s right, dog poop.

Every morning, I walk my dogs and — in an attempt to retrieve what they leave behind — cautiously step into grassy minefields of dog poop so thoughtlessly uncurbed by other dog owners, I think about the vaunted and reputed civic-mindedness of Seattleites.

What does the phrase “tax justice” mean? A definition is important because some groups claim to favor “tax justice” but really want to increase taxes on productive people and transfer resources to the state. Webster’s, in part, defines justice “as the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.” There is an organization called the “Tax Justice Network.” Many of its leaders Read More ›