The unfunded liabilities Uncle Sam has incurred on our behalf through already promised entitlements in programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the veterans benefits now exceed by $53 trillion, says Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the Government Accountability Office.
"I know it is hard to make sense of what 'trillions' means, one way to think about it is this: Imagine we decided to put aside and invest today enough to cover these promises tomorrow. It would take about $455,000 per American household -- or $175,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States."Of course, every man, woman and child does not work ... when you divide the unfunded costs of promised entitlement benefits by the number of Americans who work full time, says Walker, it equals $410,000 per worker. A married couple making $80,000 per year would have to set aside all their income for more than five years to cover their share.
Of course, elected officials in Washington, D.C., have no intention of making Americans working today pay for the entitlement benefits these elected officials are promising to deliver, that would destroy one of the primary incentives politicians have for making these promises, which is to make the voters think that, on net, the politicians are giving them things rather than taking things away.
Some day Americans will look back across the wreckage of our coming fiscal catastrophe and ask: Why didn't our leaders see it coming? The answer will be: They did.
[if we don't demand, through communication and elections that our politicians address this issue, they won't - until after the disaster. Instead, we've presidential candidates promising yet more government entitlement programs being taken seriously...]
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