A Billion Here, A Trillion There — pretty soon it adds up:
“This kind of accounting that the government does — if they did it in the private sector they would go to jail,” says Kent Smetters, a professor of insurance and risk management at Wharton.
[...]
Smetters thinks the debt-related problems are far worse than government numbers indicate. If the government followed the accounting required of corporations, it would include as a liability the present value of future expenses for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That would have made the 2006 deficit $2.4 trillion instead of $248 billion. The current debt would be around $68 trillion, not $10 trillion. “The bottom line is that they just don’t have forward-looking measures.”
(Hat tip to Dennis Mangan.)