If you are a citizen of the USA and want to be depressed, check out the
Financial Report of the United States Government - Fiscal Year 2022It starts out with a glowing letter from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. I guess she hopes you stop reading after that and don't discover the shitshow beyond. It starts right there on page 1.
They do this billions, but I'm going to use trillions, because nothing I'm going to show is less than $1T.
Total Net Cost: -$9.1T
Total tax and other unearned revenues: $4.9T
for a Net Operating loss of $4.2T
Losing over $4T in one year is pretty bad, but it gets worse...
Total Assets: $5T
Total Liabilities: -$39T
Net position: -$34T
I remember the days when we could talk about selling off USG assets to pay off its debts. Those days are long gone!
We aren't even talking about unfunded liabilities, yet. On page 2, we find that the present value of the gap between expenditures and revenues of our social insurance programs over the next 75 years is -$75.9T. This is future debt we will incur to meet these obligations.
On page 7 we have a section literally called "An Unsustainable Fiscal Path"
An important purpose of this Financial Report is to help citizens understand current fiscal policy and the importance and magnitude of policy reforms necessary to make it sustainable. A sustainable fiscal policy is defined as one where the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP (the debt-to-GDP ratio) is stable or declining over the long term. GDP measures the size of the nation’s economy in terms of the total value of all final goods and services that are produced in a year. Considering financial results relative to GDP is a useful indicator of the economy’s capacity to sustain the government’s many programs. This report presents data, including debt, as a percent of GDP to help readers assess whether current fiscal policy is sustainable. The debt-to-GDP ratio was approximately 97 percent at the end of FY 2022, down from approximately 100 percent at the end of FY 2021. The long-term fiscal projections in this report are based on the same economic and demographic assumptions that underlie the SOSI.
The current fiscal path is unsustainable. To determine if current fiscal policy is sustainable, the projections based on the assumptions discussed in the Financial Report assume current policy will continue indefinitely. The projections are therefore neither forecasts nor predictions. Nevertheless, the projections demonstrate that policy changes need to be enacted for the actual financial outcomes to differ from those projected.
On page 31, we have projections of the public debt (which is not the entire debt):
The primary deficit-to-GDP projections in Chart 8, projections for interest rates, and projections for GDP together determine the debt-to-GDP ratio projections shown in Chart 9. That ratio was approximately 97 percent at the end of FY 2022 and under current policy is projected to exceed the historic high of 106 percent in 2029, rise to 200 percent by 2046 and reach 566 percent by 2097.
Yup, that sounds pretty unsustainable.
An audit report from the GAO starts on page 42 where we learn that 49% of the USG's reported assets and 23% of reported costs come from federal entities that failed their audits. So, all those number above? They could be off by trillions, for all we know.
This thing is 258 pages long. If I go any further, I may lose my dinner.
#
debt
