US unfunded liabilities per taxpayer...$1,026,147. Assets per citizen. $242,776

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Medicare's unfunded liability $79,543,977,000,000
Social security's unfunded liability $15,118,008,000,000
Corporate assets. $13,239,329,000,000
Household assets. $57,929,716,000,000

Rounded because they were growing and growing.

On edit...missed a bunch of zeros for SS. Oops.

is that you're counting how much you'll be spending on something in the future.
Is this useful?

Suppose you are spending $1,000/month on rent and you will probably live 50 more years. Does
this mean you have an 'unfunded rent liability' of $1,000*12*50 = $600,000 ?

It's a fiscal catastrophe! You can't pay your rent for the next 50 years with your current assets alone!

:rofl:

:thumbsup:

If you have income of $2000 a month you have no unfunded liability.

This is the projected shortfall above what revenues they are expecting.

President Obama didn't put the wars on the table, though.

(sigh)

PB

Social security is funded, for instance, by the money taken out of everyone's paychecks. In no way is it "unfunded", unless you assume everyone quits working right now. Medicare is funded less directly, but still through taxes. As long as we pay taxes, we pay for medicare.

There may be some useful point to the numbers there, but to say that Social Security and Medicare are somehow separated out as "the problem" to be solved, or that they can't be made to work in any sane tax system is a RW lie.

Basically the funding is too low to fund what has been promised. That is why it is "unfunded"

...but essentially, looking just at the number for Social Security, its still BS, at least in the "unfunded liability" aspect.

Every taxpayer pays into the SS trust fund while they work. These payments go two places - some goes out to pay current recipients, and some is invested in US Treasury bonds. Because a person's working life is longer than their retired life, and because of population growth, Social Security is pretty well funded. What you pay in works out pretty well compared to what you probably take out, considering interest and so forth, and the number of people paying in vs. the number drawing out is also pretty good.

When I was younger, back in the 80's, I was much more prone to mind-boggling this-can't-possibly-go-on style economic analyses, but doom has been forecast for so long I don't buy into it much anymore. Program by program, some are run well, others (such as the Pentagon) are less sustainable, but on the whole as long as we enjoy good government and elect smart people with good intentions, the whole mess will continue to shamble along. Adjustments needed here and there, from time to time, but that's where the smart people in government come in.

"Because the Social Security program has operated on a largely pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) basis, the level of contributions of each generation of workers is not directly related to the benefits they will receive. Under a PAYGO plan, benefits are not based on the accumulation of individual contributions, as in a defined contribution plan, nor are annual contributions determined based on scheduled future benefits of current workers and beneficiaries, as in an advance-funded defined benefit plan. Rather, the combined amount of contributions from workers and employers needed to fund the system at any time has been largely determined by the total amount of benefits to be paid at that time. The internal rates of return depend on the contribution tax rates and Social Security benefit levels set by Congress. They do not in any significant way reflect the rate of interest on assets invested in the OASI and DI Trust Funds."


http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/ran5/an2004-5.html

In this case, the claim that it's "unfunded" is simply inappropriate.

"Unfunded" here just means that no secure funding source has been determined, leaving aside trivia like future tax revenues and possible changes to the program.

This is the kind of number that (D) love when it shows a (R) president is irresponsible. Such numbers were bandied about rather handily late in Bush's term because, well, of "unfunded" liabilities because of the wars: VA costs, pensions, etc., etc. It's the kind of number that (D) hate when it shows that the current state of affairs under a (D) president is untenable.

In both cases, the claim that they're "unfunded" is inappropriate. It's not that they're funded, by the usual usage of the term they're not. But they're not unfunded in any meaningful sense.

Now, there *are* unfunded liabilities, but usually they're things that the government requires but doesn't pay for and are at the state level. In some sense, next year's deficit is "unfunded," because there's no funding source IDed for it. But the government works on cash accrual accounting, it doesn't do the typical GAPP stuff. It's too big to care.

Can you show us the working on that, please (because a 'fiscally responsible Democrat' must have done that already). That site is just a bunch of numbers from someone anonymous.