Obama Deficits Much Worse Than They're Telling You
Last year's deficit was a trillion dollars worse than Obama has so far admitted.
The most important difference between the Financial Report and the federal budget is that the former calculates costs on an accrual basis, whereas the latter only measures cash flow. Thus if the federal government incurred a debt that would not be paid until some time in the future, that cost would not be part of the conventionally measured national debt. It would only add to the debt when cash had to be expended to cover the expense that had been incurred. It’s worth remembering that private corporations are required to use accrual accounting and corporate executives would be jailed for using the sort of accounting that the federal government routinely uses.
posted by Michael at
7:04 AM
1 Comments:
Here is something you left out:
Another consequence of ignoring future liabilities in calculating the national debt is that programmatic changes that save money in the future are similarly ignored. Thus, according to the Financial Report, Medicare had estimated liabilities in excess of future revenues over the next 75 years of $38 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2009. However, in the meantime, Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act, which contains significant cost controls on future Medicare spending. As a consequence, Medicare’s long-term liabilities fell by $15 trillion in 2010.
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