Free Republic

A billboard in New York City’s Times Square warns of the “ticking time bomb” that is the $34 trillion national debt. Released by the nonprofit Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) group, the ad campaign includes a 50-f00t-high billboard that will run for three months in Times Square. The digital billboard features a video of people running away in fear of a giant countdown of the national debt until it finally explodes in oblivion. Take a look: Scared of the national debt? You should be. @Comm4Prosperity's NEW Time Square billboard warns of the threat posed by the "ticking time bomb" of...

It’s a presidential election year. Time to talk numbers. It is said that the United States National Debt – that is, the total debt owed by the federal government for past overspending – is now over $34 trillion. That’s bad. Federal tax revenue – that’s all kinds, from import duties to corporate and personal income taxes – every year is about $4.5 trillion. Of that, we pay about $400 billion in interest on the national debt. That’s only about one percent of the total national debt, or about 7 to 10 percent of federal revenues (why such a range? It...

The debt, which equals the amount of money borrowed by the federal government to cover operating expenses, hit $33.04 trillion Monday, according to the Treasury Department. A roughly 50% increase in federal spending between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2021 contributed to the debt topping $33 trillion, the department said.

The new ‘minimum wage’ for government work is now $100,000+... So, just who is making all of this money? Meet the Illinois government employee $100,000 Club. It's comprised of 132,188 public employees and retirees who earned a new ‘minimum wage’ of $100,000 or more. While crime skyrockets in the neighborhoods, test scores plummet in the public schools, and inflation decimates private-sector paychecks, the Illinois public employee class is living the good life. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found nearly 500 educators in the public schools with salaries between $200,000 and $439,000. In small towns, city managers made up to $341,300. Three...

Unfunded state pension liabilities have climbed to $8.28 trillion, or nearly $25,000 for every person in the United States, according to a new report from the American Legislative Exchange Council.The American Legislative Exchange Council released the latest edition of its report on pensions in all 50 states Thursday. The report, "Unaccountable and Unaffordable 2021," shows just a handful of states with outsize pension liabilities account for a large share of overall pension debt in the U.S.The report looked at 290 state-administered government pension plans and their assets and liabilities from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2020. An example of...

To the Editor: As a Representative in New Hampshire’s legislature, I hear from my neighbors every day about the challenges their families face. The time for us to elect a new president is fast approaching, and with this in mind, I believe no candidate is better qualified to address the concerns of the nation and New Hampshire than Elizabeth Warren. I am endorsing Elizabeth for many reasons, but especially because of her Universal Child Care plan. Child care and education have always been important to me, and I know firsthand that the scarcity and cost of high-quality child care is...

Without pension reform, progressive income tax amendment guarantees tax hikes on Illinois’ middle class. ( Full title). The current progressive income tax proposal would fail to pay down the state's unfunded liability while damaging Illinois' economy. On May 20, Democrats in the Illinois House Revenue & Finance Committee approved Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s prized progressive tax constitutional amendment. While the Senate had previously passed a new income tax structure – already different from the governor’s original proposal – the House Committee also passed the amendment without putting in income tax rates. ... progressive tax proponents need to face that without pension...

Why Pensions Are A (Big) Black Swan – Chicago’s Unfunded Liabilities Are 10 Times Its Revenues, 50% Of Their Cash That Will Have Go To Pensions. [ Full title ]. ... When talk turns to what might derail today’s debt-driven “recovery,” the big names and easy stories get most of the attention: China with its soaring debt, volatile equities and heavy-handed intervention; Japan with its stratospheric debt and science fictiony demographics; Greece, which needs no explanation; the developing countries with their weak currencies and mountain of dollar-denominated debt. And of course America’s triple bubble of stocks, bonds and derivatives. Underfunded...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is acting in a bipartisan way to cover up the biggest single threat to the bipartisan political alliance that is stripping America of its wealth: the United States Congress. There is no question that the following policy is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are completely agreed that the following information should not get out to the American people, namely, that the present value of the United States government’s off-budget liabilities is over $200 trillion. The CBO has two sets of books. This is what any Ponzi scheme requires. It releases one set of books...

MILWAUKEE – Tom Barrett presides over a $1.42 billion budget and a “company” with some 8,300 employees, but with all that responsibility the Milwaukee mayor only ranks seventh on the list of top paid city employees with $145,635 annual earnings. Perhaps more striking, his estimated $2.86 million lifetime pension also ranks seventh among his Milwaukee peers, according to a new report by Taxpayers United of America. Those figures demonstrate how the public pension system is simply unsustainable, say members of that group. BIG MONEY: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett stands to collect millions in from his public retirement pension. TUA estimates...

I humbly proffer the ultimate companion piece to this morning's item, which quoted the President Obama expressing his irritation over John Boehner's incessant carping about some "government spending problem" the president is convinced doesn't really exist.  Ladies and gentlemen, it has indeed come to this:   Lawmakers are still positioning themselves for a debt ceiling fight in a few months, but one Republican congressman wants to snuff out a particular idea immediately: the U.S. Treasury minting $1 trillion platinum coins to avert a debt ceiling showdown. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) has introduced a bill to specifically ban President Barack Obama...

The fiscal cliff isn't as scary as the looming deficit and debt crisis about to swamp the country All eyes have been on the clear and present danger of the fiscal cliff—understandably—but there's a sound in the mountain range that's even scarier than the cliff. It's the sound made by an avalanche, the trillions of dollars of debt that's heading our way, gathering speed and mass. For most people, it's out of earshot now, and that's the way our government prefers to play it in its financial statements. Liabilities are not set out there in accordance with the well-established norms...

In the duh department we have this: * * * * * * * * * * * The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees' future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure. * * * * * * * * * * * Did you get that?...

From the U.S. to Germany and even Japan, where the bond market is twice the size of the economy, investors can’t get enough government securities even though rising debt loads are blamed for curbing global growth. This comes as hourly wage income in the US slowed dramatically after January 31, 2009. To counter the economic malaise, benchmark interest rates are close to zero in the U.S. and Japan and are a record low 0.75 percent in Europe. Investors remain jittery about economic prospects in the US, Europe and Japan. And the mode of US Treasury debt comes due in 2013....

Because of an accounting gimmick where governments pretend future liabilities don’t exist and, therefore, don’t account for them, most Americans don’t know how big the problem really is. The amount typically reported, nearly $16 trillion, is actually only the surface of our debt... America’s total debt — when accounting for unfunded future liabilities in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security and state and local bond debt — exceeds $130 trillion. Take a moment for that to sink in: $130 trillion. Today, more than 40 percent of our annual state budget comes from an obviously broke federal government, yet some opinion leaders...

U.S. states and localities have more than $2 trillion of unfunded pension liabilities, Moody's Investors Service said on Monday, citing data on plans offered by 8,500 local governments and over 14,000 individual entities. The total liabilities for fiscal 2010 were more than three times the amount reported by local governments. "Pension liabilities are widely acknowledged to be understated," Moody's Managing Director Timothy Blake said. Most state fiscal years end on June 30. The rising cost of public pensions has strained finances for cities around the country. Stockton, California, which last week became the biggest U.S. city to file for Chapter...

SACRAMENTO -- The decision by a conservative group to drop its pension reform initiatives could mean that Democrats are off the hook for making substantial changes to California's pension system. California Pension Reform suspended its campaign Wednesday after failing to muster any financial backing for either of its two proposed ballot measures, blaming the attorney general's office for a "misleading" title and summary that the group said would have turned voters against them. It's a blow to Republicans, who have long maintained that unfunded liabilities -- at least $75 billion -- are unsustainable and will continue to weigh down the...

y DAVID M. WALKER, The Fiscal Times December 30, 2011 In Washington, if you want to make something public while minimizing press attention, you should release it on a Friday. The current Administration topped that by issuing the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. Government, which included the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) related independent audit report on the Friday before Christmas when the public was focused on the holiday season and key policymakers were either headed out of town or already gone. The report was simply posted on the Internet and provided to the press on request and without any...

The national debt is at $14.5 trillion, but the real debt is the $211 trillion in unfunded liabilities. The national debt is the United States' current outstanding debt obligations. Though the current debt is quite high, discussion of the current debt avoids the real issue that Standard & Poor's attempted to raise with its downgrade of the nation's credit rating. The current level of debt is large, but manageable. The levels of future debt are where the real problem lies and where policy solutions need to be addressed. The U.S. government has made promises that it will be unable to...