Deficits, Debt, and Unfunded Liabilities....

I think we have a problem.

I see that the estimated deficit for 2011 is projected at $1,500,000,000,000 (one point five trillion dollars). That’s just for the federal government.

The deficit is not the same thing as the debt. If we were talking about personal finance, we would equate the deficit with the amount of money we borrow, over and above our personal income, in order to subsidize our standard of living each month or year.

The debt would be the outstanding balance on our credit cards, student and car loans, and mortgage obligations. The national debt is somewhere around $14 trillion. This year Congress and the president want to increase our debt by the amount of our deficit - just put it on the card, so to speak.

In addition to debt, the federal government has a number of what financial regulators would call “unfunded obligations”. That is, financial commitments the government has made for which there is no money set aside. Among those unfunded obligations are social security payments for generations of Americans, pension payments for retiring federal employees, and other perpetual entitlement programs. Some estimates of the amount of unfunded obligations are around $100 trillion.

But if you take the current population of the US estimated at 300,000,000 and put that against the current true debt of roughly $100,000,000,000,000 then we see that each American living today must be responsible for providing more than $300,000 toward the debt. Bear in mind that this $300,000 individual liability does not account for funding the current operating budget of the federal government of an additional $3.5 trillion in 2011. That annual subscription price comes to almost $12,000 per person.

So, my little family (of 7) must make a one-time payment today of $2.3 million, and an ongoing payment of $81,000 per year.

And that doesn’t even START to pay for my state, county and local government.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If every person in America got a bill for the cost of their government benefits, I am confident that we would be at least figuratively “up in arms” about the spending.