When the government announced this year its publicly held debt was in the neighborhood of $3.6 trillion, it was quoting a figure that "ignores massive imbalances" in other mandatory spending programs – such as Medicare and Social Security – which actually inflate the national debt by a factor of 10, according to published accounts. Dallas Morning News columnist Scott Burns wrote June 1 that the government's debt is actually "a mind-numbing $43 trillion," hinting that data was left out of the current budget document because it may have hurt President Bush's chances to sell a tax cut to the American...