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.
Q: You gave a figure per worker.
Walker: Per worker?
Q: You gave a figure.
Walker: I'm sorry; $330,000 per full-time worker, $140,000 per American, even the newest newborn.
About that $40 trillion: Walker tells us it's 3-1/2 times the entire current economy.
Which means that to cover it, every single economic activity in the United States would have to be devoted to the task for 3-1/2 years.
That's without spending a penny on feeding, clothing or housing a single American.
Something to tell your Republican friends.
The Comptroller General is the head of the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan, nonpolitical group of bureaucrats and researchers whose job is to advise Congress.
National Debunker