“Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.”
This scornful observation of our human nature is attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, an astute politician and long persevering survivor of the French revolution and Napoleonic eras. Senior politicians and government mandarins in Washington are schooled in understanding and using the insight divulged by this derogatory statement. They must be. The most extensive, pervasive and obscene rearrangement of facts has become one of the biggest lies ever floated in history.

Even those who depend on Dave Letterman or perhaps a Kardashian for remaining informed, are aware that there exists a large National debt hanging over the United States. Many of us are even aware that the often repeated amount of $17.2 trillion is an enormous amount of debt, however, it has too many zeros to be taken seriously and in any case, we heard, or read somewhere that it’s too big a debt to ever be repaid. Fortunately for the Baby Boomer generation, the younger generations are too preoccupied with earning a living, or searching how they might earn one, to be angered.
These younger generations have every right to believe what they have been told. It is not unreasonable for them to embrace the notion that since their efforts will partially finance 78 million Boomers into retirement, their own social security and health care needs will be taken care of when the time comes to retire. It is also reasonable for them to accept the veracity of the government’s representation of $17.2 trillion in debt.
Twenty five years ago, governments and corporations promised Boomers generous pensions and benefits. Promises were cheap and easily made when the future was so far into the very distant and murky horizon.
Remembering Talleyrand’s acumen, we dig a little further and discover that there are some numbers (facts) missing in the $17.2 trillion. One website offers a running amount which already exceeds $74 trillion in debt using different methodologies in the calculations. Why such significant variance? Accrual accounting – meaning the debt is accounted for when the obligation is entered into. How does the government “arrange facts?” It uses cash accounting, which accounts for Medicare and Social Security as debt when they come due. We hear nothing from Washington about balancing the budget on a fully accounted and accrued manner. We don’t even hear any suggestions on real spending cuts.
Most Boomers heading into retirement, or dreaming of doing so cannot trust the trust funds which career politicians and bureaucrats pretend guarantee their future well being. Social Security? There’s no guarantee of such for either Boomers, or their children, or their grandchildren. The only prevailing guarantee appears to be that the money will run out, then, nothing. When? Well that’s easy. That’s when . . . umm, oh no, another review of the “facts?” Now what? The Fiscal Gap. That 74 with a dozen zeros following may look ominous, but it does not fully represent the Nation’s indebtedness. The gap between costs and funds collected through time, is the Fiscal Gap.
A Boston University economics professor Larry Kotlikoff calculated the fiscal gap including unfunded liabilities, debt service costs and the mortgage guarantees under FDIC, and Fannie, and Freddie Mac and he came up with a present value of $222 trillion. That is over 13 times the total U.S. GDP. Obviously there is room for error in this number, as the world will force events which will impact future costs and revenues. The amount remains menacing regardless.

As we watch the Keynesian Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke destroy savings and generate $80 billion a month in quantitative easing, encouraged by progressive politicos spending lavishly to buy and retain votes, we know there is no possible method whereby the fiscal gap will be tightened. Future generations will wonder how we were ever able to feel no compunction to elect anyone with skills, with leadership, with will, or with a plan. They will wonder why we were incapable of discerning facts from fiction. They will wonder if we understood Talleyrand.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.
And why are we not fracking and tapping into our our natural resources?
@Tired American: #1,
Succinct and to the point. There is not one single good reason why not.
There is plenty of idiotic and uninformed acrimony spewing from sanctimonious progressives, the most pervasive coming from those entrenched in the bloated bureaucracy of government. When you have a hypocritical Administration supported by this statist mass working against common sense, all the while driving their SUVs, and using plastic, asphalt, and other petroleum derivatives, the tsunami against America becoming self reliant is overwhelming.
Our cash will continue to feed dictatorships in the M.E. and elsewhere . . . in the Trillions of dollars.