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Number Massaging

Many years ago, as a part of a long story there is no need to relate, I was forced to resign from a sales job because I was going to get fired.  There is nothing unusual in this, but the reality was that my Gross Profit numbers were on par with everyone else who was doing just fine.  I was in the middle of the pack, doing something that was quite difficult, and in which most people would have failed completely.  I am very stubborn, so I gutted it out.

The problem was that my REVENUE numbers were low. I was making more money on each sale than anyone else, because of the somewhat different nature of what I sold.

Now, at the time I attributed this to the pigheadedness of the CEO, but as I thought about it, it seems more likely that, yes, he was and is pigheaded, but also that he was trying to sell the company, and you can massage numbers much more effectively if you start from a higher number.

Accounting magic is all about making costs higher, or lower, depending on what you are trying to do.  If you are trying to sell a company, you want higher profits, so that means lower costs.  If you are trying to reduce taxes, you do the opposite.

Here is the thing: costs can be moved around, but top line amounts–how much you deposit in the bank–cannot.

The relevance to this at the present is COVID-19 numbers.  If only 600,000 people died in this country each year, and ALL OF THEM died last year from COVID-19, that would be huge.

But the background is 3 million or so.  600,000, which is where I think we are officially, is one fifth of that.  1 death in five, we are told, has been from COVID-19.

But with that background, could the real number not be 50,000?  I am going to propose that it is.  After all is said and done, I am going to go on record with what I admit is a guess that only about 50,000 Americans TRULY died of COVID-19, which is to say who would be alive today if they had not encountered this particular virus.

When you consider that, as I think was and is the case, that the average age of death for a long time was the average age of death from all causes, yes, you can of course infer that old people are more likely to die from it,

But you can ALSO infer that many of the deaths are misattributed.  They were going to die anyway.  They become free costs, floating around on the balance sheet.  Why not CLAIM they died of COVID-19, when you don’t have a clue if that is true or not?

This whole thing amounts to an accounting fraud of truly staggering proportions, which has involved most hospitals in the country, most doctors who saw COVID patients, and ultimately most insurers, which particularly includes the Medicare and Medicaid systems, which is to say taxpayers and their children (who as future taxpayers will be left with much of the bill).

With a background of 3 million anything is possible.  Any scam can be perpetrated.  To be sure, I personally believe COVID-19 EXISTS, that it is a thing, but it would not even have to EXIST for a fraud like this to happen.  Every respiratory case of any sort could be attributed to it, every accident, every diabetic coma: literally anything that kills anyone could be put into that ledger.

After all, WHO IS LOOKING?  Are there auditors out there, asking how much of this is patent bullshit?  Not that I know of.  Everyone with a job to do has scampered out of the room like a cockroach when you turn the light on, or ants when you overturn a stump.  It’s unbelievable, the sheer VOLUME–as in both loudness and amount–of cowardice and willful stupidity and incompetence and complicity that we have seen, and continue to see.

None of this should have been possible.  Substantially ALL of our institutions failed us, top to bottom and side to side.