The Financial Lies We Tell Ourselves

What's the real federal deficit?

The federal government keeps two sets of books.

The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.

The set the government doesn't talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government's accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included — as the board that sets accounting rules is considering — the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

Congress has written its own accounting rules — which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs such as the growing expense of retirement benefits for civil servants and military personnel.

Last year, the audited statement produced by the accountants said the government ran a deficit equal to $6,700 for every American household. The number given to the public put the deficit at $2,800 per household.

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You know, it's not like I didn't really know it's done that way, but when you read it with the real numbers, it's like a brick hitting you in the head.

What are we thinking????

The read this:

US 'could be going bankrupt'


The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.

Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.

According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''.

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:shk:

[edit on 3-8-2006 by loam]

So why is it that the US is still recieving money loans ?

Thats the one thing i dont get ,if i were in charge of a bank lending them money sooner or later i would ask them to start repaying instead of lending even more.

How on earth will they ever repay it ?

Originally posted by Fett Pinkus
So why is it that the US is still recieving money loans ?

Thats the one thing i dont get ,if i were in charge of a bank lending them money sooner or later i would ask them to start repaying instead of lending even more.

How on earth will they ever repay it ?

"They" won't repay it. We as the taxpayers will continue to shoulder the the load and that is exactly why the governement is still being lent money. As long as the government has a base from which to draw taxes (illegal, by the way), then banks will continue to force them to borrow, borrow, borrow.

[edit on 6-8-2006 by BennyHill]