TILT, ...

[North Pack]

From Casey Research, ...
.
For fiscal year 2009, the federal government will spend $4  trillion, leaving in its wake a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. Since the end  of 2007, the spend-a-thon has resulted in a 50% increase in marketable Treasury debt, to $6.78 trillion.
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Showing a distinct disdain for fiscal restraint, the White House  casually announced this weekend that, over the next ten years, the federal budget  deficit would rise to $9 trillion, a 27% increase from the previous forecast of  $7.1 trillion.
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Worse, the total certainly underestimates the impact of the  unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare now germinating in federal  soil -- a toxic crop that, when all is said and done, will add somewhere between  $80 and $100 trillion to the deficit.
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These are big numbers. So, big, in fact, that the human psyche, on  hearing them, tends to go straight on tilt.
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“Did you hear that the Obama administration admitted its plans  will result in another $9 trillion layered onto the federal government  deficit over the next 10 years?”
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“Really? I guess that means – TILT!  DOES NOT COMPUTE. TILT! DOES NOT COMPUTE. Hey, what’s for lunch?”
Even going through the effort to make the big numbers more  accessible – for example, by explaining that the $9 trillion works out to $30,000  for each man, woman, and child in these United States -- or roughly $77,100 per  household -- the numbers still bounce off the average mind.
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And forget mentioning the approximate tenfold increase in those  numbers arrived at by taking into account the unfunded Social Security and  Medicare liabilities – to wit, that you are individually on the hook for about $300,000,  and your household for $771,000.
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We could stop there, and probably should, but that ignores the  fact that, according to the Tax Policy Center, some 43.4% of the U.S. population  pay no income taxes.
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If I’ve done the math correctly, after adjusting for the  non-payers, individual taxpayers are now on the hook for about $520,000.

[TCups]

Did you catch that?  Unfunded liabilities of between $80,000,000,000,000 and 100,000,000,000,000 for Medicare and Social Security today, right now.  And it is unfunded because our government collected the taxes, put them in a magic "lock box" and then spent it on something else.  And both of those programs will be dwarfed by a State run medical system that covers everybody, not just senior citizens.

[North Pack]

I've been signing that song for years, - Washington, under both parties, is (has been) using taxes collected for Medicare & Social Security to run everything. This was "supposed" to be a dedicated fund, - ol' T. Kennedy blew the box open in the 60's and it's never been the same since. If "someone" had a pair, and some funding, - this is the stuff that will win elections.