David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office:
Question: When you talked about the overall debt, you broke it down; could you give me that figure again, please?
Answer: 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.
Question: You gave a figure per worker.
Answer: Per worker?
Question: You gave a figure.
Answer: I'm sorry; $330,000 per full-time worker, $140,000 per American, even the newest newborn.
The remarks were made at a forum on the coming Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation crisis (which may be the next S&L-type situation) sponsored by the
Center on Federal Financial Institutions and held today in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. A transcript will be available in about 10 days; I was there. This is truly breaking news.
We're accustomed to hearing the first figure in this mix, which is the national debt that Congress voted to raise the limit to $8.18 trillion on (that's 8,000,000,000,000 for those of you who for whom a visual will help bring home the magnitude of the thing!) And we're also accustomed to seeing that each of us owes $25,000 or so of that figure. But the truth is much worse: if you add the unfunded liability that we owe to our seniors and veterans, each worker owes $330,000.
The Comptroller General is the head of the Government Accountability (formerly General Accounting) Office, usually known by its initials, the GAO. It is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical group of bureaucrats and researchers whose job is to provide unbiased advice to Congress. The shocking thing is that, even in this administration, it actually does so. Some people think that's because even Kittykiller Frist and Denny "oh, my God, they killed Denny, you" Hastert realize they need unbiased information. I think it's because Bushco just hasn't gotten around to packing it with neocons yet.
Bill Clinton was well on the way to doing something about the debt crisis. He was going to use the surplus his policies had created to fund the shortfalls, starting with Social Security. Instead, what we've gotten from the Bush administration is tax cuts for the rich and a war that's being funded through deficit spending, pushing the debt through the roof. And now, he wants to privatize Social Security, which will tack another $2 trillion onto the amount.
Think about the $40 trillion amount. Walker tells us it's three and a half times the entire economy. That means every single economic activity in the United States would have to be devoted to simply paying off this debt for three and a half entire years, without using any of the proceeds to feed or clothe anybody. Bush blunders on blindly to his next escapade, an economic Alfred E. Neumann, blind to the coming collapse.