Posted on 11/10/2015 2:45:28 PM PST by HomerBohn
June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put the U.S. government's debt at a staggering $18 trillion. But according to a former U.S. comptroller general, the actual debt is $65 trillion -- more than triple the official figure -- and it isn't going to improve as long as politicians continue to put their personal and partisan interests ahead of the nation's.
David Walker, who served as the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008, told John Catsimatidis, host of "The Cats Roundtable" on New York radio station WNYM, that there's much more to the debt than just what the government currently owes.
"If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it's growing automatically absent reforms," Walker said Sunday.
Even Walker's calculations may understate the seriousness of the situation. Earlier this year Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff told the Senate Budget Committee that when all future financial obligations are taken into consideration, as of 2014 -- when the CBO claimed the national debt was $13 trillion -- Uncle Sam owed a whopping $210 trillion.
In truth, it is impossible to know just how deep the pool of red ink in Washington is. All projections of future debt are based on certain assumptions about economic growth, tax rates, interest rates, entitlements, discretionary spending, and so on. If any of these changes -- and all of them probably will -- the actual debt may end up being considerably larger or smaller than forecast. Nevertheless, even by the CBO's reckoning, there is a serious problem.
"If you don't keep your economy strong, and that means to be able to generate more jobs and opportunities, you're not going to be strong internationally with regard to foreign policy, you're not going to be able to invest what you need to invest in national defense and homeland security, and ultimately you're not going to be able to provide the kind of social safety net that we need in this country," explained Walker.
Of course, the bipartisan consensus in favor of a "strong," interventionist foreign policy and a "social safety net" is precisely the reason that Washington is drowning in IOUs.
"The deep hole we have for ourselves is much worse than politicians want to talk about, so they keep kicking the can down the road, hoping that somehow it will go away, but it cannot go away without economic growth and that cannot happen until we stop the endless wars and stop the endless programs for we promise people something for nothing," Paul Sheldon Foote, an accounting professor at California State University, Fullerton, told Press TV Sunday.
Indeed, Congress and President Barack Obama just kicked the can down the road even further, suspending the federal government's debt ceiling until March, a move that almost instantly increased the national debt by $339 billion. That's $339 billion more that taxpayers will now have to pay back -- or, worse, that the Federal Reserve will inflate the currency to pay off.
"Skyrocketing federal debt is a major reason why other counties are challenging the dollar's world reserve currency status," observed Norm Singleton of Campaign for Liberty. "Foreign investors are justifiably worried that the Fed's need to monetize the federal debt will result in a collapse of the dollar's value and a major economic crisis."
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also singled out the central bank for enabling politicians' profligacy. The Fed, he told Breitbart News Daily, is working "hand in glove" with deficit spenders. "You can't have a big debt without the Fed," he said.
Paul also pointed to an "unholy alliance" between Republicans and Democrats "that agrees to endless debt-ceiling increases so the conflicting priorities of Right and Left can both enjoy lavish funding," wrote Breitbart. "Military spending for the Right, plus welfare spending for the Left, combine to form a 'guns and butter' spending policy, making a mockery of the old principle that politicians must choose between funding guns or butter."
"The debt gets worse under Republican presidents, and it gets even worse under Democrats. We doubled the debt under Bush, and we're doubling it again under Obama," Paul said, promising to veto future debt-ceiling increases if he's elected president.
The only way out of the looming debt crisis is to stop spending so much, and the best way to do that is to repeal -- not reform -- unconstitutional federal programs while adopting a noninterventionist foreign policy that restores decisions of war and peace to Congress rather than the president. Unfortunately, getting politicians who believe their reelection depends on kowtowing to moochers and the military-industrial complex to enact such policies is an arduous task, especially when Americans themselves have, in Walker's words, "lost touch with reality" when it comes to government spending.
Still, Walker -- one of the founders of No Labels, a nonpartisan organization whose website says its primary goal is to get the executive and legislative branches to "solve the nation's problems" -- is hopeful that the task can be accomplished.
"You can be a Democrat, you can be a Republican, you can be unaffiliated, you can be whatever you want," he said, "but your duty of loyalty needs to be to country rather than to party, and we need to solve some of the large, known, and growing problems that we have."
Unfunded liabilities are the death knell of businesses and governments as well.
And yet Bernie Sanders says more government can solve all our problems.
Don’t worry. Alan Greenspan said we can print all the money we want to service the debt. And he’s married to Andrea Mitchell, so you know, like, dude, they’re super-smart ‘n’ stuff.
In my paranoia moments, I suspect that part of the reason so many leaders in the US sell our interests so readily is because they know the bill will come due and want to be the new ruling class the moment the whole thing comes down.
Yeah but Bernie is a dum azz psycho.
Surely there has to be a way to pay this. I’m not sure exactly what it is our how it’s going to happen but there has to be a way.
“. Alan Greenspan marries a leftist reporter. Classic example of D.C. inbreeding.
That is not good news. I had no concept of how large our debt is. It hits trillions and my eyes glass over.
“The only way out of the looming debt crisis is to stop spending so much, and the best way to do that is to repeal — not reform — unconstitutional federal programs while adopting a noninterventionist foreign policy that restores decisions of war and peace to Congress rather than the president. Unfortunately, getting politicians who believe their reelection depends on kowtowing to moochers and the military-industrial complex to enact such policies is an arduous task, especially when Americans themselves have, in Walker’s words, “lost touch with reality” when it comes to government spending.”
Right on the mark.
I don’t have a clue as to how to fix it. At home I’d cut out a whole lot of spending, sell some horses and cut up the credit cards. I think that concept is past working.
[ In my paranoia moments, I suspect that part of the reason so many leaders in the US sell our interests so readily is because they know the bill will come due and want to be the new ruling class the moment the whole thing comes down. ]
I’ve had that exact same thought.
Well I’ll go for turn out the lights, send everyone home, including the muzzy pResident back to Kenya, and let them enter the food lines like the rest of us Americans are doing....
Shut down everything until this election is over!!!!
If we started basing our money off of the number of individual atoms in the universe mathematicians couldn’t invent enough imaginary numbers to keep up with the debt load.
No matter how much tax money we shovel into its gaping maw, the federal beast is never full.
The federal government is like the kid in `The Rockinghorse Winner’: “There must be more money, there must be more money ... “.
They can’t come up with a budget. They can’t be trusted. When do we cut them off?
Perhaps we need to erase the central socialist government and all its appendages and start over with a clean slate.
This would involve gutting the convoluted systems of courts and ending the lifetime appointments of lesbians and assorted other deviates from the disgraceful Supreme Court.
All lands claimed by the central government would be returned to the states in which they are located. This would include all sites such as the Grand Canyon.
There would be no income tax excepting that levied by states upon its citizens. A small percentage based on population would be donated to Washington.
A representative body would meet only several times annually excepting in cases of emergency....of which we’ll see many of in the ensuing years thanks to what’s happened in our ridiculous past.
What was his name?
Only $65 trillion? I keep hearing that $120 trillion is the realistic number if we keep all entitlement and social spending programs the way they are now.
Sell all politicians, their staffs and all leftist federal courts employees into slavery.
I don’t know how much we’d get for Boxer, Finestein, Waters, Clinton, but we’d toss them in for good measure.
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