| The Golden Goose: A continuous resource of wealth or profit, but which can disappear if misused. DO NOT KILL THE GOLDEN GOOSE! But that's exactly what the brain trust in my home state of Illinois is in the midst of trying to do. Here's the set up: first come up with what is essentially a tax on the poor and ill-informed, frame it as a program that will fund the state's education fund and then use it for whatever reason you see fit from now into perpetuity. This is called the Illinois State Lottery. I mean they even have a great and very true slogan: "Anything's Possible!" Sure it's possible, probable…no. But that should not stop you from trying right? Leave it to the geniuses in Springfield to mess this thing up: "After years of struggling financially, Susan Rick thought things were looking up when her boyfriend won $250,000 from the Illinois Lottery last month. She could stop working seven days a week, maybe fix up the house and take a trip to Minnesota to visit her daughter. But because Illinois lawmakers have not passed a budget, she and her boyfriend, Danny Chasteen, got an IOU from the lottery instead. "For the first time, we were finally gonna get a break," said Rick, who lives in Oglesby. "And now the Illinois Lottery has kind of messed everything up." You are reading that correctly. The state is not paying out their lottery obligations from a so-called segregated fund. They were, however, able to pay a "superstar" budget "guru" Donna Arduin $30,000 per month up until Friday when Governor Rauner fired her. From our friends at Zerohedge: "Generally speaking, this just serves to underscore the extent to which gross fiscal mismanagement along with the perceived inviolability of pension "implicit contracts" is pushing Illinois further into the financial abyss, but what's particularly interesting about the suspension of lottery payouts is that the state is now effectively in default to its own citizens, something which, if the situation were reversed, would not be tolerated, and on that note, we give the last word to Rick (quoted above) and also to State Rep. Jack Franks: Rick: "You know what's funny? If we owed the state money, they'd come take it and they don't care whether we have a roof over our head. Our budget wouldn't be a factor. You can't say (to the state), 'Can you wait until I get my budget under control?'" Franks: "Our government is committing a fraud on the taxpayers, because we're holding ourselves out as selling a good, and we're not — we're not selling anything. The lottery is a contract: I pay my money, and if I win, you're obligated to pay me and you have to pay me timely. It doesn't say if you have money or when you have money." Trade well and follow the trend, not the perma-bull OR perma-bear "experts." Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! On April 2nd, 2009 CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting for the TBTF banking mafia. | 
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