Dear President Trump and Secretary Mnuchin:
As our federal government prepares to release its annual financial report for the citizens that it serves, I have a request.
Please delete the following two sentences – sentences that have appeared regularly in the report in recent years – from the section introducing the “balance sheets” (p. 48 of the Financial Statements in last year’s report).
“There are, however, other significant resources available to the Government that extend beyond the assets presented in these balance sheets. Those resources include Stewardship Land and Heritage Assets in addition to the Government’s sovereign powers to tax and set monetary policy.”
“Government’s sovereign powers” – with a possessive “s” on “Government’s.”
This is an audacious claim, especially in a report designed to secure the accountability of our government.
Who is sovereign in the United States of America?
We fought a revolution and established a new constitution a few hundred years ago, based on principles of popular sovereignty. Our government is not our sovereign.
“Sovereign” – with a “reign” in “sovereign.”
In the United States of America, we don’t have a King. We the People possess sovereignty.
I am not saying our government does not have the power to tax, or to set monetary policy. Those powers have been explicitly granted in our Constitution.
But our government does not possess those “sovereign powers.” We the People do.
Granted, this language arrives in an introduction to a balance sheet whose reported liabilities swamp reported assets.
Should we feel good about our government anyway, given that it stakes a claim, as a reporting entity, to “resources” like taxation and monetary policy? That our government’s debts (themselves understated) may swamp reported assets, but we should feel good because it can tax us and inflate the value of our money away?
Again, in a document advertised to secure the accountability of our government to those it serves?
Have all those years in school, where they told us that the USA is special because we stand for principles like limited government and popular sovereignty, and against tyranny, been wasted? Or worse, was it a schooling of indoctrination and propaganda?