Episode 135: America's True National Debt – Part 1

The official debt-to-GDP numbers are on track to be 110% by the end of the year, which is nearly a 30% increase over the last decade. The trouble is this calculation doesn’t count unfunded obligations like Social Security. Economic theory doesn’t differentiate between official borrowing and unofficial borrowing. The government has left a number of things off the books in order to keep the public in the dark about the true costs of what they are doing. Fiscal gap accounting puts everything going in and going out on the books and looks at the difference between the two streams. Right now, the US is counting the official debt of one year worth of GDP. This leaves another seven years' worth of GDP that we are not counting which is the real problem. In terms of fiscal gap, the US is in twice as bad a shape as the worst country in the European Union. In absolute numbers, the national debt is closer to $160 trillion than the $22 trillion that is officially reported. One proposed solution from...