Last November, David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, did a Q&A during a forum held at the Dirken Senate Office Building on the coming pension crisis. And guess what. The unfunded burden (debt) Walker talked of has gone up, not down, since then.
Q: When you talked about the overall debt, you broke it down. Could you give me that figure again, please?
Walker: If you consider the total debt outstanding in the United States, it's about $7.4 trillion. If on top of that, you add the difference between promised benefits and funded benefits under the current structure for Social Security, Medicare, Veterans' health and a variety of other issues, the current accumulated unfunded burden in today's dollars is over $40 trillion, which is about 18 times the entire budget, about three and a half times the economy. We are in a deep hole. First, we have to stop digging, and then, we've got to figure out how we're going to reconcile the gap.
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