4 ms·

If you consider unfunded liabilities (which obviously can be adjusted and is hard to calculate) you can add anywhere from 50-200 Trillion. http://usatoday30.us

• rayiner 14y ago
  The USA Today article is a bunch of scare-mongering for the innumerate. It's easy to make numbers look big and scary when you add them up over a 75 year time horizon without accounting for GDP and population growth. It's also a load of crock to call medicare/social security "unfunded liabilities" and add them to the debt, because they are not binding obligations. The government can cancel medicare tomorrow and there would be no recourse. Medicare/Social Security liability over 75 years is not like the federal debt--it's simply a projected expenditure on some particular entitlement program. The sensible comparison is the cost of these programs relative to GDP. That's the only relevant way to present the data. Social Security is projected to rise in cost from 4.8% of GDP to 6.2% of GDP by 2035. That's the impact of your "$63 trillion unfunded liability" on the budget over that time frame. Medicare is a bigger problem, but too much of the debate revolves around scare-mongering projecting rising healthcare costs out to infinity. See: http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/