I recently finished Hollywood Economics, a book by a brilliant mathematician named Arthur De Vany. I say “finished” instead of “read” because it’s filled with a lot of complicated graphs and tables and words like “Gaussian curve” and “fractal,” which resulted in my turning a lot of pages in eye-watering stupefaction. But I got the gist.

The gist is, the entertainment industry, where I toil ceaselessly in an effort to earn my little monthly pie, is a business of uncertainty and randomness, and whenever we try to hedge our bets — spending a lot of money on marketing, say, or paying a lot for a star-filled cast — we’re at most barely improving our chances of having a hit.

In fact, according to De Vany, when studios dump piles of money on stars and TV campaigns and McDonald’s Happy Meal tie-ins, they’re making a terrible business mistake by spending scarce resources on things that don’t change the bottom line, rather than things that do.

Like making more movies. It’s a cliché, I know, to say that studios would be better off, and a lot more profitable, by making more movies for less money — but Arthur De Vany actually proves it. At least, I think he does. It’s a complicated book. And I failed calculus.

I thought of this last week, when it was revealed that the blockbuster film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, produced by Warner Bros., has grossed something like $938.2 million to date. Since I’ve already stipulated my math skills, let’s just call that One Billion Dollars.

So what do you think is the net profit on One Billion Dollars?

Well, it’s a trick question, because according to Warner Bros., there is no net profit on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Warner Bros. accountants, like Harry Potter himself, apparently have the ability to make things disappear. According to them, the One Billion Dollars that the movie has taken in so far has resulted, somehow, in a loss of $167 million.

I know what you’re asking. How do they get away with this?

The same way Congress does. By simply redefining words — like “profit” and “net” and “loss” and “gross” — that in any other business, for any one of us, have rather concrete meanings.

Hidden in the quarterly profit statement that every studio puts out for every movie — they call it a “Distribution Report,” as if there were ever any money about to be distributed — are the tricks of the trade. There’s something called the “Distribution Fee,” which a studio pays to the distributor (surprise! the studio owns the distributor!) for releasing and marketing the picture. This isn’t a set fee, by the way — it gets fatter as the movie takes in more cash. Then there’s interest, which the studio pays to itself for the “cost” of using its money to make the movie in the first place. Meaning, the studio charges itself for being in the studio business. And finally there’s something called “Advertising and Publicity,” which in many cases is another opportunity for a movie studio to buy spots on a network that it owns.

Nice work, right?

The goal here, for the studio, is to embed enough money holes — like expandable fees — and enough profit centers — like interest payments and advertising expenses — into each production that it makes money no matter what. They’re free, when making actor deals and director deals, to offer up vast tranches of net-profit participation because, as Harry Potter and the Disappearing G.A.A.P. teaches us, there are no net profits. Ever.

You don’t have to be Dumbledore to turn a cash mountain of One Billion Dollars into a loss of $167 million. And you don’t have to be a slick studio accountant. You can be, say, Nancy Pelosi, who orchestrated a slick accounting move of her own when the House of Representatives failed to vote on a new budget, but instead “deemed” it to have passed and began spending money immediately. Pelosi waggled her magic wand — Waddiwasi! Or you can be former Obama budget director Peter Orszag, who shouted Engorgio! at his health-care-reform savings projections until they grew large enough to talk about.

When studios cheat, they cheat their net-profit participants — actors and directors and other coddled show-business dunderheads. I mean, boo hoo, right? But when Pelosi & Co., An Accountancy Corporation, LLC, cheat, they cheat their net-profit participants, and that’s us. All of us. And worse, unlike the hapless net-profit participants of Harry Potter, we’re actually on the hook for the bit that’s in the red.

It’s tempting to shake our heads, of course, and say that the system is crazy, but it’s really not.

What Arthur De Vany and a host of other smart, rational observers miss is that the point of these enterprises — blockbuster moviemaking, blockbuster government-growing — isn’t to make money, it’s to generate ongoing fees. It isn’t really to own anything or start anything or make anything, it’s to create a new stream of income that sluices money, unfettered, towards its masters. So they don’t care if a movie never makes any money, in the generally accepted, not-insane meaning of that term. It’s just an excuse to create some more fee-generating product.

When Warner Bros. creates a budget for a film, they bury all of those fees and charges deep in the document. When House Democrats create new programs and entitlements, they do the same. The federal budget, like the movie-studio Distribution Report, is a nonsense document, filled with swindles and lies and hidden fees.

So the failure of the House Democrats to pass a budget, when you really think about it, is the one honest thing they’ve ever done. They have at least one click more integrity than your average movie-studio accountant. And that’s nice to know.