Steemit has an absolute treasure trove of materials posted by bright and resourceful community members regarding government corruption, government overreach, loss of individual liberties and the need for freedom from government.
I intend to publish a series of articles on the Weapons of Control used by supposedly liberal democratic governments to control their citizens and to cover up their actions. Today, I will start with one weapon that is often not given enough attention, except by the freedom-minded among us: Accounting. If anyone else would like to join in, please feel free and please tag your article #weaponsofcontrol
First off, I will admit, I hate accounting. I have nothing against accountants. I actually quite like my own. But i hate the needless complication that comes from accounting practices. Most individuals look at finance (business or personal) as a money in/money out thing. Those of us who work in large businesses have typically come to accept the usefulness of certain accounting practices like capital depreciation. And we all love using accounting to avoid paying a penny more than we have to when it comes to the tax man! Maybe I should really say I have a love/hate relationship with accounting.
Where the relationship switches to pure distaste is with government accounting. The examples of misuse are numerous and I don't need to go into too many of them but here is an example (https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2018/05/02/watchdog-warns-of-sharp-jump-in-ontario-deficit-to-12-billion-this-year.html) The Government of Ontario (the world's largest sub sovereign debtor) is over $4 billion off in its esitmate of its deficit for the current fiscal year. This is because the government, as explained in the linked article, cooked the books and included inaccessible assets (public pension plan funds) in their bottom line in an attempt to simply cross out a large portion of their deficit for 2018-19. This would be like having a $30,000 debt with your bank and saying that you were actually in a break even position because you owned a car worth $30,000. You can say whatever you want but if you want that $30,000 debt to go away, you better be prepared to turn over the keys to the car! I wrote earlier about the Ontario leadership being called out on this and whether or not most people would even understand (https://steemit.com/government/@cwparkes/but-will-anybody-care-will-enough-people-understand). Make no mistake. They count on us not understanding!
Part of the reason why citizens let governments get away with this is fatigue. We all hear this and most people think: "Oh, government debt? Wake me when something newsworthy comes along." The problem is, those of us who have studied the problem at all realize that our governments are taking on debt that no longer can be reconciled with relatively unproductive economies and they're doing it to keep things running most of the time, rather than to build for a more prosperous future. So there it is. Accounting practices are weapons of deception in the hands of governments.
Here are some additional points to ponder:
- Why are so many public pension funds broke? Shouldn't proper accounting require segregation of those funds?
- What good would any sort of constitutional or legislative restriction on deficits do, if governments are just going to make the numbers say what they need to in order to feign compliance?
- What purpose does downplaying a deficit figure serve if all of the borrowed money is still going to need to be paid back regardless?
- Should the public even be focused on deficits in government or should we be focused on borrowing, debt servicing costs, credit ratings and overall debt burdens?
- Can we continue to accept use of the term "Unfunded Liabilities" to describe the debts that governments have to the societies that the supposedly serve? Technically those items are not debts but the reason they are unfunded is because the governments tend to borrow from themselves to make it look like they're not borrowing as much from the bond markets.
A government budget should not require a PhD in forensic accounting to understand. Let's close with the notion that every time things seem to get complicated with a government budget, more debt seems to follow.
