Will Form 5495 Liabilities 2017-2024

Music myths about the government debt. Myth number one: the government owes 20 trillion dollars. How much is 20 trillion dollars? Suppose you go to Germany and visit every town, every store, and every shelf grabbing everything for sale. The amount of money you spend will not be twenty trillion dollars. Even if you go to Germany, France, England, and all the North countries, buying everything that's for sale, you still will not have spent twenty trillion dollars. In fact, to spend twenty trillion dollars, you have to go to every country in Europe, visit every town, every store, look at every shelf, and buy everything. That's the only way to reach about 20 trillion dollars. However, the myth is that this is how much money the government owes. It turns out that there's more called unfunded obligations. Unfunded obligations refer to the money the federal government has promised but does not and will not have the money to pay. Most of these obligations are promises of retirement and medical benefits. If you take the present value of all the future promises of retirement and medical benefits the government has made, subtract the amount of money in the government's Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and then subtract the amount of money the government anticipates collecting under the current law from future Social Security and Medicare taxes, you will still have an amount of money left over that the government does not have. This is what we refer to as unfunded obligations. Estimates of unfunded obligations vary from the astronomical to the unbelievable. On the low end, people have estimated unfunded obligations to be about 80 trillion dollars, while on the high end it reaches 200 trillion dollars. This means that the federal government's total financial obligations range somewhere from...