-By John Armor
Notice how the screen writers for TV like a pack of pigeons on a handful of popcorn kernels? One finds brief success. The others hurry to claim a part of it. A few years ago CSI succeeded. Suddenly the TVs were full of “dead people” shows (as we call them with guilty pleasure).
Now, another shift has occurred. In the new wave of “dead people” shows, the heroes and heroines are solving crimes with their minds, not microscopes and chemistry sets. These involve intuitive leaps while the camera is tight on the eyes of the star. Think of all those spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone with interminable shots of Clint Eastwood’s brooding brow.
The lady enters the thinker’s office. He observes her in detail. Then he says, “You are an unmarried lady who lives in Brighton. Your brother is in the Navy.” Oops. That was long before TV. That was the beginning of an Arthur Conan Doyle story about Sherlock Holmes. One more proof that nothing is ever new. It is just presented as new by someone who’s counting on cultural ignorance among the audience.
But we are about to witness a new super hero. He’s not here yet, but he will appear, and will dominate your TV sets for the next few years.
The title is The Pencil Pusher. It’s about an accountant. I know that sounds crashingly dull, but bear with me. I add that it does not apply to the two CPAs who have worked with me for forty years. First Ben Coburn and now Curtis Mathews are both smart, well-educated and funny, no match for the stodgy image of accountants generally.
With that said, our hero is by day a mild-mannered accountant in Des Moines, doing the books of bowling alleys and cab drivers, but by night he becomes Forensic Accountant, tracking down the ocean of money that will shortly flow in even greater measure than ever before in American history. The new tide that will flow in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act is set at $825 billion of your grandchildren’s money.
It is sure to grow to over a trillion dollars. And it will be our grandchildren will have to pay the debts, if they can. Or otherwise send the nation into real bankruptcy. As you have guessed, this is not an entertainment program, but a series of news programs. Since Roone Arledge (remember him?) because of ABC’s Wide World of Sports (remember it?) was given the helm of ABC News the line between news and entertainment as disappeared..
The veteran newsmen at ABC threatened to quit. Then they accepted the next Friday’s paycheck, and hard news turned forever into happy news. But occasionally, an issue is large enough to break through and got covered. Here is the math:
The general level of waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs is about 7%. The waste increases to the extent that the people who get the money have no obligation to pay some of the costs. And to the number of political hands that the money goes through on its way from Washington to Peoria. And the size of the money pile that started the trip.
To understand the Iron Law of Shrinking Taxpayer Dollars, consider going to the Potomac River at night and taking away a quart of water. Who will even know it’s gone? From a starting number of nearly a trillion dollars, stealing a half million here and there is like that quart of water. You have to be dumb as a hoe handle to get caught.
But to find the smart crooks, to follow the money from where it began to where it disappeared in the dry sands of greed, will require an army of forensic accountants. At the low percentage and the smallest total, at least $5 billion is about to disappear.
The survivors in the shrinking print media, cannot do the job. If financial sanity is to be applied in the next four years, the cable news channels, aided by the best people on the Internet, will have to become, paradoxically, the Pencil Pushers. You may not like what you see, but do watch it, and learn from it, lest our nation die of second-most common cause of national collapse, simple bankruptcy.
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John Armor is a graduate of Yale, and Maryland Law School, and has 33 years practice at law in the US Supreme Court. Mr. Armor has authored seven books and over 750 articles. Armor happily lives on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge. He can be reached at: John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
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