The Truth Of The National Debt

Any reasonably well informed person could tell you that the National Debt is currently in excess of $13 trillion, and that is more than the Gross Domestic Product of the United States. But that's really only a fraction of the story.

In creating massive government and its endless spending programs, lawmakers have left the United States taxpayer on the hook for a massive amount of as yet unfunded liabilities. Because once enacted, entitlement programs almost never go away, they will eventually have to be paid. So they could themselves really be described as debt.

Of course there's the $13+ trillion of the official National Debt figures, more than enough to consume an entire year of our GDP and nearly every last U.S. Dollar in circulation. Then, according to Federal Reserve's figures, there's another $2.5 trillion or so in state and local debt, which the Federal government has pledged to pay.

One large unfunded liability is current pension payments owed to retired government workers, in programs which have been horribly mismanaged by labor unions. They are an influential lobby pushing Democrats for a bailout. If it happens would be as much as $3 trillion.

But we're not even on to the big ticket items yet. Add in Social Security and Medicare with a combined unfunded liability of $106 trillion, a few other odds and ends, and our government is at least $131 trillion dollars in the red. That's just about ten times the published National Debt figure. So why the two sets of books?

Because big government, tax and spend Keynsian economics is a dismal and utter failure. At its current size and rate of revenue collection, the Federal government is unsustainable. Because the current crop of Washington insiders isn't about to let go of their power by shrinking the size of government in a meaningful way, they'll have no choice but to try to raise more revenue. If they sold off every piece of government owned land, assuming there was a buyer who would pay market value for it, they might net $50 trillion. That's peanuts at the current rate of spending growth.

Higher taxes are coming, higher income tax, a VAT Tax, surtaxes on any group unlucky enough to find itself outside the mainstream; they're going to put the Laffer curve to the test as never before...unless we stop it.