[Will88]

The dirty little secret is that we are obligated to pay around $115 trillion – on top of the national debt – to programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.

Meaningless unless they tell us over how many years those obligations will become due. Even if that information is provided later in the article, the writer shouldn't stick that sentence near the top or the article with no mention of when the obligations become due.

Sometimes I wonder if folks who write such things even realize that the obligations become due over many years, or if they just like to write doomsday articles.

Not minimizing the problem, but it's just sloppy reporting to not put our long term obligations in context. And most everything I see on this subject does not.

[Pelham]

“Sometimes I wonder if folks who write such things even realize that the obligations become due over many years, or if they just like to write doomsday articles.”

They do it to sell financial newsletters or to get hits online. The pitch is based upon the fact that a lot of people don’t know how finance works and it’s easy to con them with scare stories.