What the feds, the states and the locals really owe..

A lot of the recent talk has been over B Hussein Obama quadrupling the yearly federal deficit (which he and his party have done) and doubling the national debt over the next ten years. But don't you hate it when someone puts the truth out...and that is a painful thing. What the feds owe is just a shadow of what we really owe. From this week's National Review (RIP WFB, your work is still going on)

The Other National Debt by Kevin Williamson

The whole article is well worth your reading but here is the summary:

About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number:...

Beyond the official federal debt, there is another $2.5 trillion or so in state and local debt, according to Federal Reserve figures. Why so much? A lot of that debt comes from spending that is extraordinarily stupid and wasteful, even by government standards. Because state and local authorities can issue tax-free securities — municipal bonds ...

One of the biggest is the pension payments owed to government workers....the states, in their capacity as the laboratories of democracy, have been running a mad-scientist experiment in their pension funds, making huge promises but skipping the part where they sock away the money to pay for them. ....Ground Zero for the state-pension meltdown is Springfield, Ill., and D-Day comes around 2018: That’s when the state that nurtured the political career of Barack Obama is expected to be the first state to run out of money to cover its retirees’ pension checks. Eight years — and that’s assuming an 8 percent average return on its investments. (You making 8 percent a year lately?) Under the same projections, Illinois will be joined in 2019 by Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana. If investment returns are 6 percent, then 31 U.S. states will run out of pension-fund money by 2025...


So how much would the states have to book to fully fund those liabilities? Drop in another $3 trillion. Properly accounting for these obligations, that takes us up to a total of $19.5 trillion in governmental liabilities. ....The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare ...a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.) ...... Bartlett calculates that an 81 percent tax increase will be necessary to pay those obligations. “Those who think otherwise are either grossly ignorant of the fiscal facts, in denial, or living in a fantasy world.”...There’s more, of course. Much more. Besides those monthly pension checks, the states are on the hook for retirees’ health care and other benefits, to the tune of another $1 trillion. And, depending on how you account for it, another half a trillion or so (conservatively estimated) in liabilities related to the government’s guarantee of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and securities supported under the bailouts. Now, these aren’t perfect numbers, but that’s the rough picture: Call it $130 trillion or so, or just under ten times the official national debt

Total...One-hundred thirty trillion, give or take a few bucks...

Don't you really feel good about giving these people your health care!