Say Anything Blog

The federal budget deficit would have been 69 percent higher than the $162.8 billion reported two months ago if the government had used the same accounting methods as private companies, the Bush administration reported Monday.

That should read that the federal government REQUIRES of private companies. Which is makes the whole situation even more absurd.  The federal governement forces companies to follow a set of accounting practices that they themselves do not.

"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.”
- John Adams

Troy,

Its worse than that!  FASB, SarBox, the SEC, and the IRS all require companies to account for their unfunded liabilities, something the federal government has not done since 1968 when LBJ and a Democrat Congress instituted “unified” budgeting thus capturing federal trust fund revenues but not the downstream liabilities those revenues were meant to fund.

Enron, at its worst, was doing nothing that the federal government hasn’t been doing for the past 40 years.

“Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”

I’m all for holding the govt fiscally responsible in all ways, not just the accounting.

"Give the lefties a pile of money, and they’ll spend it buying votes.” - Rush Limbaugh on the “bailout”.