Thread: Tea Party's rise makes perfect sense

Tea Party's rise makes perfect sense

By Robert Herbold and Scott Powell

If our elected officials were accountable to the rules they require of the private sector to ensure honest accounting, such as the standards of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and the business reform laws of Sarbanes-Oxley, they would not only be removed from office, but many would be in jail.

Can anyone really trust the Congressional Budget Office' assessment of health care reform, wherein 10 years of taxes "balance" six years of health care benefit expenditures? How is it different from the crime committed at WorldCom about 10 years ago, in which fraudulent accounting mismatched expenses to income over the years in which they were incurred? The new health care bureaucracy will likely drive cost overruns like every other entitlement, but obviously "ObamaCare" goes negative in Year 11 and beyond.

Even before passage of health care reform, the public understood that Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt. The year-long debate didn't address that, but it helped voters see the government's accounting tricks to shift the liability of Medicare off the budget to suit politics. This deceptive accounting eventually will facilitate the bankruptcy of the United States as surely as the off-balance sheet liabilities brought down companies like Enron.

No doubt Bernard Madoff gets the Heisman Trophy for white-collar crime. But his Ponzi fraud that robbed the public of some $50 billion is dwarfed by the Social Security system that is a classic Ponzi scheme, in which present and future retiree claims cannot be met by those entering and currently paying into the system.

Fannie, Freddie and Co.

And consider the recent debt-driven meltdown that caused the worst recession since the 1930s. The legislators who opened the floodgates for the proliferation of subprime debt by pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower their portfolio standards were never held accountable. Fannie and Freddie required a $100 billion bailout (and counting) from taxpayers, but the lawmakers — well, they got promoted to chair the committees in charge of solving the problems they helped create.

Is it really any wonder that a "Tea Party" movement was born a year ago? What kind of government are we getting for the taxes we pay April 15? The fact that the Tea Party has gained center stage in American politics just one year from its founding reveals the breadth of lost public trust. Career Democrats and Republicans have too long been in denial of the elephant they brought into the living room — a dependency on buying votes without regard to deficits or debt. And now President Obama, the emperor who claimed to be committed to rolling back lobbyists, earmarks and profligacy with transparency and bipartisanship, has revealed for all to see that he has no clothes and that, in true Chicago style, the ends justify the means.

Incumbent politicians from both parties are now vulnerable — especially those visibly tied to the corrupting influence of big-money special interests. The obvious need to cut government spending is abrogated by these lobbyists who control funding for politicians' re-election campaigns. Each party has different entrenched constituent lobbyists. But their net effect drives ever more government spending, taxes and debt. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted in recent testimony before Congress, this burdens the private sector and edges the country ever closer to insolvency.

A quiet calamity

The watchmen to shine the light on all this abuse used to be the press. But in a media culture that embraces celebrity, sound bites and — yes — political correctness, the nation's slide toward financial ruin just didn't get the attention it most certainly deserved. Many reporters were all too happy to vilify the culprits of capitalism, as with WorldCom, Enron and the like, and to crowd the courthouses for the CEO perp walks. But they should have spent just as much energy taking to task the government players who enabled this financial catastrophe.

So what's to be done? The blatant disrespect for the will of the majority and the Constitution is setting up the November elections as a momentous turning point. Common sense truth that resonates with peoples' deepest concerns is very powerful as demonstrated in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Voters' instincts are to protect their children and grandchildren, and nothing will get out the vote better than candidates who articulate a vision of freedom and opportunity that cuts spending, streamlines benefits and once and for all puts America's financial house in order.

Robert Herbold is a retired COO of Microsoft Corp. and managing director of the Herbold Group LLC. Scott Powell is director at AlphaQuest and Remington and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/fo ... 4_ST_N.htm

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