This is the truly scary part.
So many people do not know about this massive "tax" on the unborn.
I did a full independent investigation personally some months back to look up the US unfunded liabilities (both federal + state)....its quite an impressive deadly amount amounting to by my estimates....about 120 trillion gross and around 30 - 60 trillion net. The US needs to produce a bunny out of the hat in the next 10 years....20 years is the absolute deadline....or its going to be in for a world of hurt down the road.
This is BTW why the Trump economic plan has been deemed to add to the debt more than hillary because he wants to cut taxes and something like 60% of the spending is commited to such liabilities (mostly servicing the debt accrued to pay for them). Means you can only reduce spending by 40% of the total budget (i.e spend on absolutely nothing else!) already....and of course you cannot do that (someones gotta pay the essential bills)....so you can cut spending by maybe 10% at most (hence why trump wants to defund NATO etc). But the other side just wants to pretend like nothings wrong and continue abominations like Obamacare.
How has this been allowed to happen in a country so rich and wealthy? The whole system has been hijacked by the wealthy and corrupt since the cold war ended.....and the greenspan financial "miracle" started. Its sad because Greenspan was originally quite a laissez faire guy, but he conveniently deserted his principles and theory....and in practice printed what was needed to be printed to back up the financial bubbles....part 1 of the deflating we saw......and many more parts to come in future.
Maybe this is as good as it gets given fair neutral capitalism simply is not allowed to take root because of vested interests in preserving quite "socialist" and inefficient edifices....mostly based around the govt. A very nasty pact has been signed between the top capitalists and top govt bureaucrats to create glass ceilings in many areas to preserve what they have and not risk it for the greater good. The problem is the massive toll this takes on the average person....the US median wage has not increased appreciably in real terms since the 70s oil crisis and meanwhile all kinds of political prestige (social welfare) have mounted up and are defrauding the whole country.
There are real lessons for China and others here. I hope they learn them! Prevention is better than cure.
Yes, in order to see the true picture of how deep is their debt, no one can ignore the astronomical amounts of unfunded liabilities payable to American public in social security and pension, both federal and state, and how it's accounted for (or lack of it) per GAAP. How the government gonna foot the bills? Ask fed reserve? I don't know, I even doubt Trump, Clinton or anyone else knows.
But what's known are massive discretionary expenditure (aka "superpower" of DoD, NSA, CIA, ...), "missing" monies from DoD (remember $6.5T just recently?), massive currency-fueled consumption & government expenditure (aka world's largest "economy") while production is tiny, sustaining external deficits, and worst of all, massive borrowings from outsiders. How they gonna pay that? Ask fed reserve, again?
Some say thermonuclear bomb is the most deadly thing men can create, well, check hyper-inflation.
Who is looting American public's future, and letting down international creditors?