Our real liabilities; long term US debt

The biggest problem that we're going to encounter in the future is the money that the government has not allocated, for items they promised to pay for.

In a corporate environment, these are known as liabilities. Corporations have to use accrual accounting instead of cash accounting.

In cash accounting, its real easy to calculate your balance. You just indicate revenue - expenses.
So if you spent $50,000, but made $60,000, you would indicate $10,000 of profit.
Now here's where things get complicated.
Let's say that you owe $200,000 to someone who billed you for services to your business, but you didn't have to pay the bill for another 2 years.
In cash accounting, you still had $10,000 of profit. On paper, your business is making money.

Corporations can't use cash accounting for this reason. They have to indicate what their liabilities are on their balance sheet. Somewhere on their financial statement, they would have to indicate that they owe $200,000.

How does this relate to our government?
Our government does what no business would ever be allowed to do: they put off obligations (money owed), often sell bonds to cover these expenses, and then indicate a balance that doesn't reflect this debt.

If I've lost you, you can always read this USA Today report that puts it into perspective.

The $61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations amounts to $528,000 per household. That's more than five times what Americans have borrowed for everything else — mortgages, car loans and other debt. It reflects the challenge as the number of retirees soars over the next 20 years and seniors try to collect on those spending promises.

Most people are familiar with the fact that we are currently $14 trillion in debt as a country, or that we are now running deficits of over $1 Trillion a year. In this post, I explained how the current administration is now running a deficit averaging $1.7 Trillion a year. But most people aren't aware of how much we truly are in debt.

So as you listen to congress talk about cutting $10 billion, or even $50 billion from the budget, and as you hear congressmen protecting their pet projects, remember that figure: $61.6 Trillion.

More on the US Debt

Here's some other ways of putting this into perspective.

From CNS:

In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

Read the article. Its a pretty good explanation of our debt.
ABC News explains more... even though it contains our president explaining away how he's trying to cut our debt.

Over the past year alone, the amount the U.S. government owes its lenders has grown to more than half the country's entire economic output, or gross domestic product.

Even more alarming, experts say, is that those figures will climb to an unprecedented 200 percent of GDP by 2038 without a dramatic shift in course.

You don't need to wait until 2038 to panic.
In the meantime, the poverty rate is rising? AP calls the timing 'unfortunate' for the administration:

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

"Most Fiscally Irresponsible"

US News kinda sums it up for me:

It is unnerving to wake up and learn that you have a mortgage on your home that exceeds the value of the property. Or, and too often both, you have a credit card line that you cannot repay and the issuer has you on the rack for ever bigger compound interest on the debt. The lesson has been well and truly learned that debt catches up with you. Millions understand that they are just going to have to find a way to live within their means—and then still eke out some savings to pay down debt. And there are well over 14 million Americans without a paying job, so the level of discontent is very high. Just how are they going to regain control of their lives?

Debt, by state

As we all know, government spending is up. Not just on the federal level, but on the state level too.
So its worth knowing what your debt is, in the state that you are in, for the state that you are in.
CNN Money has provided this handy chart.

Take a look. Be informed.

Federal Debt? Its not $13 TRILLION

Just so you know, when Obama entered office, the debt, as of January 16th, 2010, was:

$10,628,881,485,510.23

Right now, according to the article in the Washington Times:

Calculated down to the exact penny, the debt totaled $13,050,826,460,886.97 as of Tuesday, leaping nearly $60 billion since Friday, the previous day for which figures were released.

Thank you Democrats. You irresponsible assholes.
In 16 months, you've added 2.5 Trillion to the debt. And that isn't even including the Health Care mess you have coming our way.