This is a repost. If you haven't already, please give it a read.

TWO LITTLE WORDS
Off-Budget

As everybody knows, from the moment you wake up to the last thing before bed, we pay taxes. We pay taxes on our money when we earn it, spend it, secure it, release it – everyday in everyway, we are taxed. In the nineteen sixties, women were actually taxed out of the home just to pay the taxman and the final insult: we are, yet again, taxed when we marry and taxed when we die. The government tells us it needs our money for every damned ‘entitlement’ to arise in the mind of the tyrant and in the early 1990s; Bill Clinton even taxed us retroactively. We get faint ‘representation’ for all these taxes and those we elect to protect us are bleeding us dry, affecting the very fabric of American society.

Back in the days of the odious FDR, the downward slope to stifle our productivity was greased with the Ponzi scheme of Social Security… which was neither very social, nor secure at all. Pay in a buck when it’s worth a buck; get it back when it’s worth less than half. FDR took a few social problems and turned them into the worst social mess we have ever been in and made personal responsibility moot. Even those who want to invest in their own future are stymied. We are constantly told the governments, federal and state, need more and more money with each new budget presented. But this is a damned lie. Our bloated and intrusive federal government and states make more money on our money through investments and the truth of the matter is that we do not need to pay taxes at all.

Imagine how our economy would soar if we kept the money we earned and either saved it to allow new investing capitol, spent it which creates jobs and increases productivity and growth, or, by using it in any way we choose, have lives that are richer as a family or as a nation. Keep all of the money we earned? Bet you think I’ve gone ‘troppo’, as my Australian friend would say, that I’ve taken too much noonday sun. But the other evening, I had my eyes opened about the truth of budgets and the incredible importance of two little words: ‘off-budget’.

I have recently learned that the bulk of the money the government makes, as reported in each state’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) is off-budget. It would analogous to me making $100,000 per year (I don’t) and making a budget for $20,000 and if I go over it by just a buck, I am over-budget.

In the trillions of dollars taken in by the feds, a small portion is designated as budget and vast sums are simply not included. We have no real national debt, nor do we have a deficit, for the money made, especially in foreign markets(ah, that tiny and ubiquitous label, Made in China found on practically everything today) far outweighs the cost of running this bloated and corrupted national government.

The United States makes enough money on its investments, the stock it owns represented by the Dow Jones Industrials and the market averaging stocks, to abolish not only the IRS but also give every citizen a check for thousands at the end of the fiscal year. Alaska is already doing this and I had no idea until I watched a taped interview with Walter Burien Jr., who worked as a Wall Street commodity trader for fifteen years, on the Alex Jones (infowars.com) program.

But don’t take my word for it; see for yourselves. Just use a search engine and plug in Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) and you will pull up all the state’s data and find that billions of dollars are off budget, billions of dollars far outweighing those funds stolen as revenue and it need not be so.

http://www.financialprivacy.com/comprehe.htm I include excerpts from the introduction to this informative article herewith for your edification:

Walter Burien Jr. worked as a Wall Street commodity trader for fifteen years, but now resides in Arizona. According to Mr. Burien, every state, county and major metropolitan city is keeping two sets of books. One set (the ‘Budget’) is commonly available and tracks each governmental entity’s costs and tax revenue. The Budget is the financial record that’s seen by the public and used by politicians to justify new governmental services and higher taxes.

However, there is a second set of books (called the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, or CAFR) which is virtually unknown to the public but contains the real record of total governmental income. According to Mr. Burien, although the Budget gives an accurate account of government costs, only the CAFR gives an accurate account of government’s income.

For example, while a particular state budget might report receiving $20 billion in taxes (just barely enough to sustain its $20 billion in costs) - the CAFR might reveal the state’s real income is in the neighborhood of $60 billion - three times as much as reported on the budget. If these allegations are accurate, the particular state could stop charging all the taxes we are familiar with and, not only survive but, either double the amount of reported government services or give every citizen a huge tax rebate.

Wow! The states and feds are keeping two sets of books; one they trot out to show us how badly they are funded and use as reason to increase taxes, the other to keep track of the real picture, the real numbers, the vast wealth accumulated. I could be wrong, but isn’t this illegal if you try to do this with your business, or I with mine? No doubt if we were scamming in this creative accounting, we’d be ‘vacationing’ at clubFed.

Since the major media are all involved in this scam, don’t expect to see this sober subject pop up on the evening news, but the Internet has all the information and the citizen has only to read around and see for themselves.

That’s what I did, thanks to Alex Jones and his invaluable work at infowars and what I learned stood my hair on end. Puts a whole new slant on the combined state and federal confiscatory rate we now pay in taxes of about 52%!

Imagine: not having to pay taxes, getting a check in the mail at the end of the fiscal year that represents the true amount the states are earning with out money… boggles the mind. Consider this:

Mr. Burien reports first discovering the CAFR report in New Jersey in 1989, when he helped start a New Jersey tax protest group called "Hands Across New Jersey". While involved with that group, Mr. Burien read in the state’s Annual Budget that the total cost of all public services was $17 billion and the "net available" (the money on hand to pay all bills) was $24.6 billion. But then he asked the first question the IRS asks in any audit: "What are the gross receipts? He added the figures from various sources and came up with about $44 billion and began to wonder how the state could have $17 billion in costs, $24.6 billion in cash on hand, and $44 billion annual income? The numbers didn’t add up, so he began to dig deeper.

Because his father had been Personnel Manager for the State Treasury for eight years, Mr. Burien understood how to get around in the various government departments. The state Director of the Budget was on vacation, so Mr. Burien called one of his lowest level assistants and said, "I’m working on a report for Richard and I need all the figures on the autonomous agency accounts, interest accounts, investment accounts." The assistant said, "Oh, you want the CAFR." This was the first time Burien had heard of CAFR but he said, "Yes" and the assistant mailed it to him.

The CAFR showed that New Jersey had liquid investment funds (cash) of $188 billion; common stocks worth $70 billion, $10 billion in loans due from public and private corporations, and $14 billion in insurance company equity participation. The little state of New Jersey, which admitted to less than $25 billion in annual income on its budget, reported $300 billion in cash, stocks, loans and equity participation on its CAFR. According to Mr. Burien, "On that day, I learned the definition of syndicated organized crime."

The scam worked something like this: Anything that was a cost or expense for public services (the traditional side of the Annual Service Budget, such as the Department of Transportation, health and welfare, etc.) was reported on the Budget where public taxes paid 100% of the bill for those services. That was $17 billion.

However, any governmental agency that was a profit center (the Port Authority for New Jersey, the New Jersey Turnpike, and investment account, etc.) that generated no-tax revenue was "restricted by statute from being reported in the Annual Budget. Why? Because the state legislature passed laws to prevent reporting the income from profit center on the Budget. Instead, income from these profit centers was disclosed only on the CAFR.

But that disclosure was not immediately apparent. For example, when Mr. Burien looked for New Jersey’s 1989 "gross cash receipts" in the CAFR, he found the figure buried on page 174, under the "Waste Water Treatment Trust Fund". It showed the amount of the total cash receipts for 1989 from all 69 autonomous state agencies and departments was almost $87 billion. In other words, New Jersey was charging $87 billion to provide $17 billion in public services. New Jersey citizens were paying $5 for every $1 in services they received, and the state was pocketing the other $4 as "profit".

The CAFR also reported the state owned $32 billion in common stocks - but this figure was footnoted. The footnote revealed that the stocks were valued according to their original purchase price, not the current market value. In other words, if the state bought a stock in 1968 at $1.25 a share and it’s worth $3,000 a share now, they still report it on the CAFR as worth $1.25 a share. Burien determined that the true market value for the "$32 billion" in stocks reported on the New Jersey CAFR was actually about $70 billion.

But Mr. Burien goes further - he claims that the dual system of books is not unique to New Jersey, but also common among all fifty states. Moreover, he claims the dual accounting system was not only used ten years ago, but is still being used today.

For example, "In 1987 Arizona’s annual service budget reported $2.8 billion in revenues but the state’s 1987 CAFR reported total cash receipts of $3.1 billion, a mere $300 million difference."

"However, in 1997, Arizona reported an Annual Service Budget of $5.5 billion while the State’s CAFR (printed by the Auditor General’s Office) showed total gross cash receipts of $17 billion. That’s a difference of over $11 billion. In just ten years, Arizona had caught up to New Jersey in that both states’ annual budgets reported less than one-third of the actual gross income seen in the states’ CAFRs.

"CAFR reports indicate that the composite totals for all government (Federal, state, county and city) ownership of publicly traded stocks exceeds $32 TRILLION (53% of the total ownership of all listed stocks), $8 TRILLION in insurance company equity (should we be surprised by high priced mandatory auto insurance or unaffordable health care?) and $5 TRILLION in Bond Surety Escrow Accounts for future liability of existing or potential debt.

Governments use Bond Surety Escrow Accounts to evade that pesky little rule that government should not operate at a "profit". That is, government should not impose more taxes than it actually uses to run the government. By designating tax revenue that exceeds operating costs as "Bond Surety Escrow" for future liability, government avoids calling excess revenue a "profit" and is thereby enabled to continue to enrich itself at public expense.

To illustrate the potential for abusing "future liability payments", consider the New Jersey plan in the 1950s to build the New Jersey State Turnpike and Garden State Parkway Authorities. The state asked voters to approve a $7.5 billion bond to construct the turnpikes. The state explained that these turnpikes would be operated as toll roads by the bondholders until the $7.5 billion bond was paid off - but the bondholders could not operate the toll roads at a profit. Once the bonds were repaid, the turnpikes would revert back into the state’s Annual Budget as a normal cost/revenue item. The public voted Yes.

Over the following years, the state sometimes alleged that the toll revenue from operating those turnpikes failed to cover their operating expenses, and so additional bonds were passed to fund the turnpikes. As a result, in 1990, the total bond liability still owed for the turnpike had grown to $14.5 billion. But guess how much was in the ‘Bond Surety Escrow Accounts’? $38 Billion! Enough to repay the original $7.5 billion bonds almost four times!

How could that happen? Say the toll road made a $400 million profit for the year and the scheduled payment on the $7.5 billion bond was $100 million. The state made the $100 million payment but kept the extra $300 million in a Bond Surety Escrow Account for ‘future liability payments’. Although they kept the $300 million, they did not declare it as an asset but wrote it off as a line item payment. In other years, even though they made a profit, they’d allege that they lost money and therefore floated more billions in bonds. (Guess who pays?)

The bottom line is that New Jersey is collecting hundreds of billions of virtually unreported dollars from all the autonomous agencies. The motivating factor is not public welfare, but control of those billions. Mr. Burien not only alleges that the dual accounting system exemplified by CAFR is not only used by all fifty states, but also by all counties, cities and the Federal Government itself. If Mr. Burien’s allegations are correct, they comprise the most damning indictment of big government yet seen. In sum, Mr. Burien implies that our government is in fact a criminal enterprise bent on oppressing Americans by extorting several times as much tax revenue as it spends on public services and using the majority of those extorted revenues to enrich, empower and enlarge government at public expense.

Just last weekend, I traveled the Garden State Parkway down to the NJ shore to attend my daughter’s baby shower. Not only was the traffic crazy, due to the brand new EZ PASS lanes added and drivers who use this monitoring tag racing around to find the proper toll lane, but on the way back, I hit the traffic jam which encompasses the Union area, from one toll booth to the next, as drivers squeeze from ten toll booths to four lanes and then back again for the next toll. (My friend tells me they do not call it a ‘park’-way for nothing.) Add to this, the fact my car is old, (and Clinton outlawed freon,) so I had no air conditioning to beat the oppressive heat of the heavily trafficked road.

I am old enough to remember the empty promises about tolls only being collected for a short while and then the road would be paid for and travel would be easy. But, just like the federal government and all the entitlement programs and special administrations, nothing so hard to kill as something the government terms “temporary”, especially if it involves revenue.

But thanks to Alex Jones, Mr. Burien’s curiosity and knowledge and the site Anti-Shyster, edited by Al Adask, for bringing this all into the light of full disclosure. Knowledge is power and this information is dynamite.