A Problem Seven Times Worse than the National Debt

The national debt of the United States is barreling out of control and American politicians appear completely unwilling to anger prospective voters by honestly saying “The American taxpayers cannot afford to give you everything you want.”

The US national debt is currently 16.8 trillion dollars. That number is too large for most of us to imagine.  To make sense of it we have to convert it into numbers which we can imagine. The most meaningful representations of the national debt are to think of it as $53k for each and every US citizen or $148k for each and every US taxpayer. We can also try to relate to the national debt by comparing it to our enormous student loan debt (1 trillion dollars) or our embarrassing credit card debt (849 billion dollars). We could also compare it to the amount of debt owed by US state (1.2 trillion dollars) and local (1.8 trillion dollars) governments. By any reasonable measure, the US national debt is enormous. Very few Americans can even imagine sending a personal check to the US government for $148k to pay off the national debt. Most Americans can’t even pay off their credit card debt and our national debt is twenty times larger than our credit card debt.

Unfunded Liabilities

Unfortunately, there is a fiscal problem facing the nation which is more than seven times larger than the national debt. This problem is the unfunded liabilities of the federal government. Unfunded liabilities are payments the US government has promised to make, but does not have the funds to pay for. The “big three” unfunded liabilities are federal liabilities for Social Security ($16.5T), the Prescription Drug Benefit ($21.8T), and Medicare ($86T).  Together, these three unfunded liabilities total 125.2 trillion dollars which the US government does not have.

To obtain these funds, the US government will have to ask each American citizen to pay $1,097,275 into the federal purse. Yes, every American citizen is effectively in debt to the tune of more than one million dollars due to the spending problem which the politicians in Washington D.C. deny exists.

Do you think the US government has a spending problem? Sound off in the comments!