If you are an American taxpayer, you are more than one million dollars in debt. This may come as an unwelcome shock, as the median income for an American is only $28,567/year. What bank would loan a million dollars to a person who earns less than $30k/yr?
This debt is not, by and large, a result of the official national debt. The national debt currently stands at $13.9 trillion dollars, which is only $126k per taxpayer. At $30k/yr, you could contribute 20% of your earnings to paying off the national debt every year and be done in only 21 years — not including interest charges.
The real debt of the American government is not included in the official national debt. The real debt is in the form of what are called “unfunded liabilities.” These are things that the U.S. government has agreed to pay for, but that it does not have the money to pay for. To meet these “unfunded liabilities”, Uncle Sam has to reach his hands into your pockets. The unfunded liabilities for Social Security are $14.7 trillion dollars — a number larger than the national debt. The Prescription Drug Program is even larger though, at $19.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Both of these are dwarfed however, by the truly immense $477.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities of the Medicare program. In total, the U.S. government has committed you to funding $111.9 trillion dollars in promised benefits. The liability for each individual taxpayer amounts to $1,012,463. This doesn’t include the $126k you owe due to the national debt.
These liabilities are guaranteed by the total assets of the American people. Unfortunately, the total household assets of all Americans are worth only $54.7 trillion dollars. If every American could find a buyer who would pay fair market prices for every single asset they owned, we would not be able to pay for even half of our unfunded liabilities.
If this doesn’t strike you as a smart way to run a nation, please forward this post to every eligible voter you know. We can try to blame the fools in Washington for the mess we’re in, but we should remember who sent those fools to Washington in the first place.
