The Economic Crime Scene of the National Budget

The US taxpayer ultimately has to pay the bill incurred by bad government. Main Street has to pay the bills left behind on Pennsylvania Avenue. The ancient Greek legend of Sisyphus is on one level an allegory of the sad slavery of the American taxpayer. Deficit spending and massive corruption are the two ingredients found at this national crime scene.

The pigs stealing from the government have always competed to get a place at the national feeding trough. That is what the famous political machines of Tammany Hall (1789), and the Boss Tweed Gang who controlled Tammany Hall during the regional financial debacle of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge from 1869 to 1883 were all about. Political machines manufacture money from graft. The goal isn’t just political power and control. It is to quietly siphon off as much money as can possibly be done discreetly. The power is simply needed to accomplish the real job. In the process the politicians and their cronies get very rich.

The Nascent and Early US Government was Arguably more Honest Than the Modern One Is

Government In the early days of America, when the people involved in government were mostly Christian and believed in and feared God, was arguably more honest than it is today. In those days most (but certainly not all) politicians were honest, respected and well-meaning servants of the nation. The thieves who sought and found ways to pilfer the national budget were relatively few. Nonetheless economic incompetence, foolish deficit spending, and government corruption has always been a problem at some level.

In Recent Decades Government Deficit Spending and Corruption Have Exploded

Since the Second World War the sheer size of the national budget has worsened the problem dramatically. What was a trickle of deficit spending and corruption has become a flood. What has changed in the modern post-Christian era is the blatant level of almost everyone being self-serving. Altruism and statesmanship are almost nonexistent in modern times. Almost every elected politician and government employee, at the highest levels and many administrative levels below those is involved in one criminal scheme or another.

Overt criminal bribery is bad enough. However, the US anti-bribery laws do not include payments made to friends and family members of politicians and government administrators, so the “friends and family discount” process is not even overtly illegal. Criminal oversight has become so thin and nonexistent that it is a national joke.

The government contracts for goods and services from non-government organizations (NGOs). Favored NGOs can easily and often do raise the cost of their bids for government contracts and then kick back a portion of the higher cost of the contract to the government administrators who approved the bid, and to their many cronies, often including their nominal overseers.

This has long been the routine process in the system of siphoning cash from government coffers and distributing it into private pockets. The best-documented example of this process is the system used by Boss Tweed and his associates who were involved in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. When it was fully disclosed, it was discovered that The Tweed Organization had been making monthly payments to over 2,000 corrupt public employees in Borough of Manhattan.  Half of the Brooklyn Bridge Project was funded by the Borough of Brooklyn, so it is generally assumed that the Tweed organization only accounted for half of the public graft involved in the overall bridge project.

The endless back door kick back payment system is also why such construction projects invariably take much longer to complete than the actual time required for the construction process. The longer the project goes on, the more government money can be siphoned out of the project into corrupt private pockets. This is one of the reasons highway widening projects are always so far behind urban traffic-flow needs. Think of California’s recent Democratic party-driven high speed train to nowhere project, and you get the picture.

The 1,928 mile transcontinental railway project was completed in just 6 years, between 1863 and 1869. It cost the government nothing but land grants, and it started while the nation was engaged in the overwhelming distraction of The Civil War. The fact that no government money spent meant that there was no graft stolen out of the government coffers. The private sector got the job done, because they were looking after their own money. Think of Space-X’s successful rescue of the astronauts trapped in the International Space Station, and again you get the picture.

Deficit Spending During Peacetime Is Never Really Legitimate

During wartime, governments routinely borrow money to finance wartime needs which can’t wait. When the war is won, responsible governments then invoke prudent austerity measures and work their way through paying off the national debts.

The horrible Great Depression which lasted from 1931 to 1945 was initially greatly worsened by the foolishly imprudent tight money policy of the Herbert Hoover administration, and arguably by the international trade war precipitated by the US congress’s equally foolish Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which converted an American Depression into a global one. It was further prolonged by the subsequent foolhardiness and bad management of many of Franklin Roosevelt’s Neo-progressivism New Deal programs.

The British Economist, John Maynard Keynes Justified a Knavish Economic Practice

After the onset and deepening of the global Great Depression, in 1935, the British economist John Maynard Keynes published his most influential work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In that book Keynes famously described a short-term emergency measure of government deficit spending, “to prime the economic pump.”

Keynes’s carefully chosen words have been distorted by knavish politicians who have subsequently twisted his words into a justification for a government policy of routinely and continuously pending more money than the national income can pay for. The result is an increasingly crushing national debt burden. At best this mortgages our future and that of our children. In fact it is likely to destroy the nation.

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Kiting checks always ends badly. Our government is routinely doing that, which the people can not legally do.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that:

“Compound interest was the greatest invention in the world.”

Compound interest is also often referred to as the most powerful force in the universe because it allows money to grow exponentially over time by earning interest on both the initial principal amount and the accumulated interest. While this is a fantastic money-making fact it is only good for the lender, it is a disaster for the borrower.

Debt is the economic slavery of having to pay someone else that compound interest.

The US National Debt was 39.2 trillion dollars and climbing on May 1st, 2026. The astounding value of the America’s unfunded liabilities is far worse and is valued at over 175 trillion dollars. Main Street will never be able to pay this debt off. Yet corrupt politicians keep spending money they don’t actually have.

Conclusions

Capital concentration is fundamental to government. That version of capitalism is the economic foundation of all governments. It is also the sweet honey which draws the flies.

Real oversight of criminal government spending and corruption is a national imperative. It must act first on the private fraudster NGO government contractors, because they have the least political protection, and together they are likely the largest group of siphonners.

The source must also be addressed mercilessly. Mandatory prison time for elected officials and government employees must become routine. Criminals must be treated like criminals! The now far-too-common wink-wink, nod-nod stuff has to stop!

Without these measures America is done.