A Conspiracy To Hide The Truth: Why The True U.S. Gov't Debt Is $205 Trillion

By Robert Wenzel

Economic Policy Journal / LewRockwell.com

November 11, 2013

Dr Laurence Kotlikoff , professor of economics at Boston University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was recently interviewed by the Financial Sense Newshour about the true state of fiscal affairs in this country. He explains how the government uses accounting tricks to hide the truth and keep everyone in the dark about the US’s actual debt-load, which runs $205 trillion versus the $17 trillion you often here in the news.

Kotlikoff also details the ongoing pattern of obfuscation, censorships, and firings of government personnel attempting to disclose budgets of prior Presidents when doing so is deemed politically inconvenient. This is a must-listen interview. Here we present a few key excerpts:

Jim Puplava: Professor, officially we’re in debt over $17 trillion but underneath it there’s a bigger problem. I wonder if you might explain to our listeners what that bigger problem is?

Professor Kotlikoff: The liabilities the government owes are mostly off the books. We have a true debt picture which is about $205 trillion. This is recording all the future obligations the government has, whether they are official obligations or not, such as paying for your social security benefits, mine, or your mother’s Medicare benefits, defense spending, etc. All of these things are really obligations that aren’t recorded on the books as debt, whereas paying off future principal and interest payments on Treasury bills and bonds are recorded. So, anyway, if you take the value of all of those commitments and subtract all the taxes coming to pay those commitments, the difference is what’s called the fiscal gap; and that fiscal gap in the U.S. is now $205 trillion. So, the true debt is $205 trillion; the official debt is only $17 trillion. So, most of the problems we’re facing, most of the debt we have, the vast majority of it is off the books and Congress has done bookkeeping to make sure the public doesn’t see it. So, when we have these big fights over the debt ceiling, it’s really laughable because at the same time we may not be expanding our official debt at a very rapid rate, we are expanding our unofficial debt or off-the-book debt, unrecorded debt, at a very high rate.

continue article at LewRockwell.com:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/robert-wenzel/the-conspiracy-to-hide-the-truth/