Economist: United States Worse Off than Greece

Dr. Laurence Kotlikoff is an economics professor at Boston University. He says the Treasury and the government are fudging the national debt numbers. Kotlikoff says the United States is bankrupt and we don’t even know it. During his SOTU address, Obama called for a freeze on discretionary spending. He called for a five-year freeze on non-mandatory domestic spending, a proposal he estimated would save $400 billion over the next decade.




He said entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will need to be reformed without mentioning specifics. In other words, the government is thinking about cutting these programs to the bone. Boomers will be eating dog food after their pensions are stolen and the entitlement Ponzi scheme breaks down.

On Thursday, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf testified before the Senate Budget Committee. He said if the country does not balance the budget soon it will find itself in a debt-driven fiscal crisis. According to Kotlikoff, we’re already there. He made his observation in August of 2010. Since that time, the debt has grown even worse.

“Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.,” he wrote. “This gargantuan discrepancy between our ‘official’ debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities ‘unofficial’ to keep them off the books and far in the future.”

According to the IMF, in order to address this the government needs to double our income taxes. The “IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act,” Kotlikoff wrote for Bloomberg. In 2008, trends forecaster Gerald Celente predicted that by 2012 the United States will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches.