You shouldn’t go around touting that you balanced your budget when your deficit is $44 billion.” Good advice, no? Well, Sheila Weinberg said it first.

Ms. Weinberg has taken on the world’s most yawner of a topic, accounting, and is trying to get your attention. If we don’t (or can’t) follow our governments’ accounts, politicians and bureaucrats will rob us blind.

She founded the Institute for Truth in Accounting in 2002. And she’s kicked up a ruckus. According to a recent Institute report, our federal financial hole is over $53 trillion. To fund our politicians’ promises and pay off debt and other bills, everyone in America would have to send a check to D.C. for $176,700.

“If a corporation did this, they’d have to shut down,” Weinberg says. “But it’s just common practice for the federal government. . . .”

Are states in better shape? Well, take Illinois. Weinberg calls it the worst mess in the country. Sure, the state’s constitution requires a balanced budget, but lawmakers have hid both bills and borrowing, and managed to fabricate a surplus out of a $44 billion deficit.

Thankfully, Ms. Weinberg has blown the lid off this story . . . and she intends to bring her work to a government near you. I call this heroic accounting .

I can’t think of any movies where an accountant comes into a business, or a government, and saves the day. But maybe there will be one, someday. It’ll be about Sheila Weinberg.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

You think I’m going to leave my money down here with you?” It could be any taxpayer talking to any politician.

But it’s not. It’s Alabama Senator Charles Bishop complaining about a 62 percent legislative pay raise . Bishop opposed the hike and so higher-up hoodlums in the legislature suggested he just leave the extra dollars in the general fund, just forgo the big pay boost.

When grabbing more pay, legislators play at the top of their game. In Alabama, they snuck the latest pay raise onto the floor and passed it without even a recorded vote. Why? So no one would know who voted yes and who voted no.

Legislative rules say that a vote must be recorded when three or more members request it. Somehow the presiding officer didn’t see all the people raising their hands and yelling to be recognized.

Governor Bob Riley had the good sense to veto the hefty legislative heist, but legislators quickly and easily overrode the governor’s veto.

One state representative said legislators need not fear the wrath of ‘Bama voters: Voters “hate us together but they love us as individuals.”

That love may be fickle. At Flashpointblog.com Brian LeCompte says he’ll work to make voters remember the culprits. He writes , “This display of arrogance shows us why we need Initiative and Referendum in this state . . . [to] allow Alabama’s citizens to bypass our legislature. . . .”

Roll citizens!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

How can you lose definitively and then win a resounding victory anyway?

Well, it helps if you’re Clint Bolick . Bolick wrote the book on how local governments often turn into freedom-killing leviathans. The book is called, in fact, Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty.

Bolick is also a lawyer who co-founded the Institute for Justice, which has achieved many legal victories for individual rights around the country.In an article for The Freeman magazine, Bolick tells the story of a cabbie named Leroy Jones, an immigrant from Africa. Jones and a few friends decided to leave the Yellow Cab company of Denver and start their own firm: Quick Pick Cabs.
But their competitors quickly picked a fight. Quick Pick Cabs had put together all the paperwork and insurance they needed. But they couldn’t get a taxicab license from the Public Utilities Commission, which bowed to the objections of Denver’s established taxicab companies. The Institute for Justice took the case to court on behalf of Quick Pick, but lost.

Then the Institute got a second hearing: from the court of public opinion. CBS’s “Eye on America” did a story on Leroy Jones, portraying him sympathetically as a man who simply wanted to pursue the American Dream by honest work. A man unfairly thwarted in that pursuit. As a result, Colorado deregulated entry into Denver’s taxicab market.

Bolick won. Leroy Jones won. We all won.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s getting mighty crowded at state capitols in Michigan and Minnesota.

Politicians in both states want to raise just about every tax ever dreamed up. And they’re even dreaming up brand new ones.

Which means citizen leaders in both states are mobilizing taxpayers.

Michigan government faces a $686 million deficit, in no small part caused by already sky-high taxes that are driving people and businesses right out of the state. At a Michigan Taxpayers Alliance rally, Eric Tubbs, a car dealer from Sandusky, carried a sign that read “Not Another Penny, Jenny.” Tubbs says Governor Jennifer Granholm’s tax-raising will “drive more people out of Michigan. It’s hurting my business. It’s hurting our economy.”

But even with a looming deficit, legislators are proposing new spending. Including I kid you not buying an iPod for every student. This brilliant idea led the Detroit News to argue “the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy.”In Minnesota, taxpayers just held the largest capitol rally in state history, organized by “Mr. Right,” radio talk show host Jason Lewis. Even though the state has a surplus and legislators gave themselves a pay raise, legislators are now clamoring for more money.And the state’s aggressive Taxpayers League is mobilizing opposition to the legislature’s grabby fingers.If you’re a taxpayer headed to the capitol to talk taxes with your legislator, be sure to give yourself extra time to find a parking space.This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Soon after Hurricane Katrina flattened the Gulf coast a couple years back, another storm hit. A storm of frivolous pork-barrel spending.

Exhibit A was $223 million for the so-called “bridge to nowhere,” to connect the Alaskan town of Ketchikan to a nearby island airport. Townfolk could get there already. By ferry. But hey, why take the ferry for seven minutes when you can force taxpayers around the country to pay hundreds of millions for a bridge?

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens , the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate, threatened to resign if Congress de-funded his bridge. Promises, promises. The earmarks got dropped. And Stevens? Still a senator.

But Alaska still got hundreds of millions in generic transportation dollars to spend as it chose. The state legislature allocated tens of millions to do the Ketchikan bridge anyway. And more tens of millions for a bridge in Anchorage. However, many Anchorage residents don’t want the new bridge, citing high financial and possibly environmental costs.

See? Many supposed beneficiaries of pork just don’t want it.

This is important. Concerned citizens must make a point of fighting not just the federal pork going to other states. We must fight Ãespecially, and loudly largesse flowing to our own states, cities, neighborhoods.

Let’s kick the struts out from under our politicians’ rationalizations. They say they’re bankrupting the country for the good of their constituents. Let’s tell these jokers: “You say this is for us? We don’t want it!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.