What is your share of the public debt?

It’s that time of year when we review the impact of government debt on individual taxpayers. It is important to remember who is responsible for the government’s reckless spending overruns.

Every time we hear politicians make campaign promises, they sound like they’re spending their money. But the government has no money, so the only way they can implement their expensive ideas is to tax their citizens and businesses, as that is their only source of income.

What’s really troubling is that when the US government (and most others) planned their budget for the current fiscal year, they budgeted to spend more than they knew they would receive in tax revenue. In fact, since 1970, the US has only balanced its budget four times. France has not had a balanced budget since 1974.

When governments overspend, they need to finance those deficits by issuing bonds. As the debt continues to mount, more and more of the budget goes toward paying the interest on those bonds. Last year, the US government spent more than $250 billion on interest payments alone to pay down federal debt. They spent more than $430 billion if we include state and local government (SLG) securities.

Every election the candidates claim they will not increase the debt, yet with the exception of four years in the last 45 years, every year the US government has increased the debt significantly. In Obama’s eight years in office, US debt has ballooned further, by nearly $10 trillion to $19.86 trillion.

The almost $20 trillion is the official debt figure, but there is also a huge amount of ‘unfunded liabilities’. Future obligations, such as Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Affairs, and federal employee benefits, are not funded. The total of these ‘unfunded bonds’ amounts to more than 100 trillion dollars.

Here are the current US debt figures:

1. Official US debt = $19.86 trillion
– debt per citizen = $61,133
– debt per taxpayer = $166,240

2. Total unfunded liabilities = $104 billion
– liability per citizen = $320,749
– liability per taxpayer = $872,205

Add it all up and each taxpayer’s share of the national debt, and ‘unfunded liabilities’ = $1,038,445. That is not a misprint. Each taxpayer’s share of the debt is over $1 million!

And every year that the government spends more than it has, it adds to these totals. When the government spends, it is the taxpayer who must cover the costs.

Stay tuned!