The Political Coalition: Cough it up! Uncle Sam needs your $3,747,412 check to pay your debts! Now!

By John Sykes

You think the debt crisis is bad now. Hold on. It’s going to get far worse. What is really unforgiveable is that the numbers shown below aren’t glaringly made public. Here are the highlights from a Businessweek piece:

The national debt is only a small part of U.S. liabilities. Failure to raise the debt ceiling would hurt the global financial system, but the threat is minimal compared to the real danger: Sharply rising healthcare costs combined with the aging baby-boomer generation.
The U.S. is in danger of reaching a generational tipping point at which older Americans have the clout to vote themselves benefits that sap the strength of the younger generation—benefits that can never be repeated. We may already be there, if the vitriolic opposition to entitlement cuts is any indication.
Even the $4 trillion "grand bargain" would not fix the nation's real fiscal problems. A June analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that keeping the U.S. debt to GDP ratio consistent until 2085 would require cutting spending and/or raising revenue by 8.3% of GDP annually for the next 75 years. That's $15 trillion over the next decade.
The fiscal gap—the net present value of all future expenses minus all future revenue—is $211 trillion, according to CBO calculations.
The size of a deal is far more important than its composition i.e. spending vs. taxes. The reason so many plans aim for $4 trillion is because that's the amount that would, temporarily, stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Note that we need $211 trillion in the bank right now to pay our future obligations, implied or not. There are somewhere around 112,611,029 households in the USA. That means Uncle Sam should be banging on your door asking for a check for $1,873,706 so that we can meet our future current obligations.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Since less than 50% of this nation pays little if any taxes, you’re going to need to double that check to $3,747,412.

You think this is crazy? Can’t we pay it off with future revenues? Not a chance! Our politicians will just continue to increase our current spending which they have been doing throughout modern history. We are already fast approaching the need for 100% of our GDP to pay our debts.

What nobody will admit is that we are bankrupt already !