Unbelievable….  I have only been looking at some of this for about two days, but because of certain other background, I know it’s  — sensible.

I’m not even going to bother much of an introduction.  This post consists of three articles on the topic — the top one (in a frame) is from 2012, in response, I believe to California having “discovered” $54 million in a special fund after it had threatened to close the parks.  The people who responded to the appeal and donated to keep parks open, want their money back.  The next is 1999 (WorldNetDaily) and I believe the last is from 2000 (also WorldNetDaily).  I am posting them to put some concepts in our // the blogosphere’s head.

LOOK — I blogged AFCC pretty hard (not only me, but I worked at it) and to go to TAGGS.hhs.gov (not that it’s accurate, but it’s an indicator) and to look up tax returns on court-referred nonprofits, and I got as far as, the Income Tax is the problem, creating a dual-class society.

This just takes it up a step:  Enjoy!  

I am sitting here also reflecting on the past years of my life when I was trying to get back in the system, i.e., Dammit, let me back in the workforce, and cut this custody/child support racket.  I didn’t realize at that time that my primary value was not as a worker, but as a breeder for a little social security # (actually, more than one).  Apparently they can be used multiple times from multiple funds….

There are times I’ve been hungry — and close to homeless, or (more often — and to this date) been extorted with the threat of homelessness over the issues of protesting simple matters, and to silence speaking up on it.  Over time (in my microcosm) I came to realize this was about money only (for some) and kids, secondarily.   NOW, I don’t even want back on the system — or to “feed it” any of what remains of my life energies.

Put this together with other material, and it does start to come together, i.e., citizenship in the United States is a contract.  The United States (as we now interact with it, not as we mythologize it) is a corporation.  A very, very large one.

Wars take money, raising money causes debt; after the war, a bankruptcy gets filed causing corporate restructure, while all of us are kind of told nothing has significantly changed — think about 1776, and believe that it’s still that same old USA. . . . .

I’ll shut up.  Just put some of this in your pipe and smoke it – and this ain’t weed:**

**(note:  non-user).

INTRO from “BIO” of Mr. Burien:  Pretty much after this, the blog is not my writing — sources are the links.  Cut and paste, you know how that goes!

THE GOVERNMENT’S SECRET SLUSH FUNDS

‘Trillions of dollars hidden,’ finance crusader charges

Published: 06/14/1999 at 1:00 AM in World Net Daily, by Sarah Foster:

All levels of government conceal the existence of these vast sums of
money by keeping and filing what amounts to two sets of financial books
– one for the general public, which shows a very limited revenue
stream, and the second, for political insiders, bond brokers, investors
and the like, which reveals the money hoards and gives an accurate
account of a government’s income.

There’s enough money in these hoards — largely the result of
aggressive investing on the part of government — to pay off the $5.6
trillion national debt and the accumulated state and local debt many
times over, plus cut everyone’s taxes for years to come, according to
Walter Burien, a former Wall Street commodities trader, whose
revelations — on talk radio and the Internet — about government
finance practices have sparked a nationwide firestorm of public outrage
over an arcane, hitherto all-but-ignored subject.

The first set of government books, the budget, projects the flow of
tax money into the general fund for the coming year and directs how it
will be spent. The second is the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
(CAFR), and not one City Hall watcher in a thousand has ever heard of
it.

“Everyone knows about budgets,” says Burien. “Politicians use the
budget to ask for more money, to try and show that a city or county is
poorer than it is. They’re playing the public for dupes on the budgetary
basis — that is, they only mention the budgetary basis and never
mention the comprehensive annual report that’s the real set of books.”

CAFRs (pronounced “cay-fers”) are financial documents that show,
among other things, the balances of all the funds for a given entity –
e.g., city, a county, school board. CAFRs, says Burien, report a
government’s total income, which is exponentially greater — millions
and even billions of dollars greater — than is shown by the budget.

Burien is essentially charging that many, if not all, governments,
from the lowliest water district to the state legislature to Congress
are significantly underreporting their incomes and overcharging for
their services — and nobody’s calling them on it. The press won’t, he
says, because they’re part of the cover-up.

But is he right?

Reached by telephone at his Arizona home, Burien described how in
1989 he came face to face with a CAFR for the first time. At the time he
had just helped set up a tax protest group called Hands Across New
Jersey, the state in which he was living.

“A governor — Jim Florio — had just been elected on an anti-tax
platform,” said Burien, “but as soon as he gets into office there’s a
$2.2 billion tax increase — the largest in the state’s history — and
the proverbial whatever hit the fan. One local radio station was doing
some rabble rousing and asking people to call in with examples of waste
in government spending. Most examples involved $5,000, $15,000. The
highest was $85,000. And the callers were all furious and foaming at the
mouth at these examples.”

Aware that the state of New Jersey handles billions of dollars,
Burien figured that if there were any waste it would be in the millions,
not thousands, of dollars. He checked the state Annual Budget Report,
which showed the costs of all services to be $17 billion, with the “net
available” (for paying bills) at $24.6 billion.

“Then I asked the question the IRS asks, where are the cash gross
receipts? I added up to at least $44 billion for annual income.”

Burien noticed that certain state agencies — the so-called profit
centers — like the New Jersey Turnpike and the Newark Port Authority
weren’t mentioned, and he called the Office of the Budget for more
information. Posing as a low-level bureaucrat, he said he was preparing
a report for the director and needed figures on the autonomous agency
accounts, interest accounts and investment accounts.

“Oh, you need the comprehensive annual financial report,” he was
told.

“Bingo! That’s the first time I had heard of that,” said Burien,
emphasizing that he had been involved with finances and accounting for
years and knew his way around state and local government agencies — yet
had never heard of a such a report. He arranged for one to be sent to
him.

A self-described “bottom-line kind of guy,” Burien “crunched” some
numbers and came up with some astonishing figures.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked. “Here’s the statement of the
service budget — $17 billion. Yet they brought in $86.799 billion for
the year. New Jersey was charging $87 billion and providing $17 billion
in public services.”

Worse, the CAFR for the fiscal year showed New Jersey had liquid
investment funds of $188 billion; common stocks worth $70 billion; $10
billion due from loans to public and private corporations; and $14
billion in insurance company equity participation. New Jersey, which
claimed less than $25 million in annual income on its budget, was
sitting on $300 billion in cash, stocks, loans and insurance equity,
according to the CAFR.

“On that day, I learned the definition of syndicated organized
crime,” he said. “There was a real scam going on. Costs and expenses for
public services were reported on the budget where taxes and fees paid
100 percent of the bill for the services. Which in New Jersey that year
was $17 billion.

“But, whenever there was a profit center — like the turnpike or the
Port Authority — that generated non-tax revenue, the legislature had
restricted that income from being reported in the budget. Income from
the profit centers was shown only on the CAFR.”

Having heard the wake-up call, Burien today is a man with a mission.
He has been on numerous talk shows. As a result the Internet is humming
with e-mails and reports by activists across the country swapping horror
stories about similar discoveries of hoards of money squirreled away in
obscure fund accounts by “servants of the people” at City Hall . . .

NOTE — there is more to this article, and other points of view or explanations of CAFRs which are worth reading.  About now, my mind — which usually does OK processing basic concepts, and often new concepts — is having a bit of a rough time trying to grasp the significance of this,  let alone application to real-time decision making.  Please note – 1999 was a very long time ago.  However, I believe burien’s basic analysis makes sense, which is found over at CAFR1.com:

_ _ _ Another similar article, in interview format — this is with Geoff Metcalf, found at WND (a conservative site):

Date is August, 2000:  http://www.wnd.com/2000/08/6265/  “THE GOVERNMENT’S SECRET TRILLIONS.”

Metcalf’s daily radio show can be heard on
TalkNetDaily weekdays from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time.

Question: For those who do not already know the story, how did you ever find out about these Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports?

Answer: About 10 years ago, I had been a commodities broker on Wall Street for 15 years. I was one of the first tenants in the World Trade Center. I did an international newsline coast to coast on commodities. I thought I knew what was going on; I thought I was one of those sharp little crackers. I always thought government was maybe hiding 5 to 10 percent maximum of the revenue and not reporting it to the public.

{{then he goes into the situation in NJ and new governor, see above)}}

I have ONE thing to say.  You have to start reading this — and understanding it.  If I can understand it, you can understand it.  Period.  If you can’t understand it here, find somewhere else in which to understand it.  Sorry about my formatting — but, then go get this understanding on a website whose formatting you like better.  And when the local government (which is a corporation) tells you they’re broke, you’ll know — as I pretty well began to understand about a year ago — they’re simply lying.  Oh, not everyone in gov’t may know — but the fact is:  it’s a Goddamn lie.  See Silva v. Garcetti for just a sample, just in one timeframe.

I got it that Friday and started crunching numbers. Here’s a state with a declared service budget of $17 billion showing a net available on their budget report of $24 billion. The year’s totals on the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report: $188 billion.

Q: $188 billion!?

A: Correct. Investment funds, assets and so forth. The income I started looking for was total cash gross receipts — the number one item the IRS asks you for in an audit.

Q: Would this be interest on investments?

A: Total income. Whether it be cash collected by state agencies, federal grants, the whole nine yards — total income. I found it on page 174 of the 1989 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report under cash additions. Here’s a state with a declared service budget of $17 billion that was bringing in, “in cash,” $86,799,000,000. I learned the definition of syndicated organized crime on the spot and the principle of operation. Anything that was a cost and an expense, an outright cost on a budgetary basis, the public footed 100 percent of the bill for 100 percent of the services. Anything that was a substantial profit center was totally restricted by statute from inclusion whatsoever with the budgetary basis.

Q: This is above and beyond the off-budget stuff.

A: Whenever you hear the word “off-budget,” that is something that is inclusive in the budget. When you look at the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, you will see complete separate areas totally restricted by statute for inclusion with the budgetary basis. A lot of people would refer to it as “two sets of books,” although it’s not exactly two sets of books. The budget report is in one book, and the Consolidated Annual Financial Report is THE book, the showing of the complete pizza pie.

Q: There are two things I want us to make real clear. You conducted your investigation in New Jersey. But this is not unique to New Jersey.

A: I’m going back 10 years. When I found out about New Jersey, especially when I found out they had approximately $80 billion in common-stock ownership, as a commodity trading adviser …

Q: You wanted them as a client.

A: That was actually true to a certain extent. But I was mad more than I was greedy. I said, “How could I have not heard of this?” Here’s New Jersey holding $80 billion in common stock. I was a commodity-trading adviser. I dealt with a lot of the CEOs of some of the major investment firms and I never heard it mentioned — in any circles. I found out when I called the mailroom of the Department of Treasury for New Jersey. It was sent out to every editor of every paper up and down the East Coast. It was sent to the directors and CEOs of ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. And now I’m getting mad. I was seeing a cooperative effort at non-disclosure and it wasn’t as if it was just created that year and the word hadn’t gotten around.

Q: This Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, is it just a stack of numbers or is it something that has an executive summary and can actually be read and understood?

A: The CAFR is set up to be a simple, quick evaluation book to show: total income, total assets, total investments, total net worth. What’s been going on in this country for the last 65 years is government will always focus the public’s attention — intentionally so — on the budgetary basis of the budget report. And the only thing the budget report is, is their annual operating expenses.

Q: Give me an example.

A: Say it cost us $30,000 a year to maintain our house. Say our salary or income was $100,000 a year and we had a million dollars in investments, and say our total net worth was $3 million. What if we talked about our $30,000 budget as being our net worth? It would be ludicrous.

Q: So this is an intentional scam?

A: You’ve had a shell game played on the public where governments are constantly talking their budget, their budget, their budget. They just happen to leave out the decades and decades and decades of investment wealth that has been building up, the decades and decades and decades of enterprise and venture projects they have created separate from the budgetary basis.

Q: Just how ubiquitous are these Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports?

A: The Comprehensive Annual Financial Report was created by a group called Government Financial Officers Association in 1946. It was a program created to standardize accounting in all local governments so the federal government could easily see what the true picture was. In 1981, the federal government mandated that all local governments prepare a CAFR or, in the alternative, a combined financial statement. To qualify this, there are over 54,000 separate corporations within local government.

Q: What kind of corporations are you talking about?

A: A city is a corporation; a state is a corporation; a school district is a corporation. Each is filing their own separate report, each with their own investments. I’ve had a lot of people looking at their state reports. They see the tens of billions of dollars they never knew existed — and they are floored. Then I bring to their attention: “You’re just looking at the state report.”

Q: Give us an example.

A: I’ll use the state of Washington as an example. It lists $64 billion in liquid investment funds. Now the state of Washington has 2,300 separate local government corporations filing their own separate reports: cities, counties, school districts, authorities. You have 2,300 other reports.