I’m not the only person who’s concerned about just how far into the red the U.S.’s financials look if you start projecting out into the future. William Newkirk at the Swamp writes about an article put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Quoting Newkirk:
If you calculate the government’s future obligations (expenditures for everything from Medicare to defense) and subtract the government’s expected future tax receipts, you come up with a fiscal gap of $65.9 trillion (in current dollars).
Kotlikoff, an expert on “generational accounting,” puts an exclamation point next to that $65.9 trillion. It’s five times our annual gross domestic product (GDP) and almost twice the size of current national wealth (all our financial assets like stocks and bonds and our real assets like buildings and infrastructure).
You may want to check out the article or the Swamp’s summary for a proposed solution to the problem. It ain’t pretty.
However, let me make my periodic reminder that this is a big problem, folks. And I’m very sorely disappointed that politicians seem unable or unwilling to even talk meaningfully about it.