by Robert Rohlfing

We hear all about the $16 Trillion dollars in debt that our country is in, but the much larger problem and the one that our politicians and citizens do not want to talk about honestly is the $80 Trillion Dollars in Unfunded Liabilities at the federal level.

We all know about how the states and local governments are being swamped by these obligations, but we cannot even have an honest discussion about the true nature of the long term problems that we face because for one reason or another it always turns into a Left-vs-Right you-are-wrong-and-stupid argument. We have those in congress such as Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer who will not even let this be discussed in all the negotiations that we currently hear about going on with the debt crisis that this government created.  It is easy to understand that they do not want to do so as it exposes the blatant mistakes that those in government have made over the years and this includes those from both sides. They are well aware of the true nature of the fact that if we do not address this head on and across the board that we are only just kicking the can down the road further. Eventually that can comes to rest and what you get is an economic collapse.

The hard thing to understand is that the economic collapse does not only effect the United States alone but also the world economy as a whole. There are different ways that people think that we can start climbing out of this from raising taxes to creating the mechanisms for inflation to increase. All of these things sadly are going to occur regardless under the current path that we seem to be going down. We hear so much about raising the taxes on the upper percent, but what so many fail to understand is that we are obligated to around $7 Trillion dollars a year on average just to cover our obligations from pensions to Medicare and Social Security and that is just going up as the baby boomer generation hits full stride in retiring. Raising taxes is not the only way to get out of this problem long term, we have to reduce our obligation to these liabilities and reduce the coverage over all in the end. It will not happen today because no one in politics has the guts to do so because they are all too worried about getting reelected, but at some point economics catches up to politics and we are on the verge of crossing the Rubicon now and in the near future.

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