Leading economist says U.S. national debt is actually $86.8TRILLION
The U.S. government's books are in the red by more than $86.8trillion, according to an influential University of California San Diego economist.
That's a number more than five times as large as the figure acknowledged by the U.S. Treasury and used by government agencies to justify their budgets and spending.
Officially, the debt stands at $16.7trillion, including nearly $12million in debt held by the public in the form of Treasury Bonds, wrote James Hamilton in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But that number doesn't include several 'off-balance sheet' obligations including $54.1trillion in missing funding for Medicare and Social Security, along with support for federal housing, loan guarantees, savings deposit insurance and the cost of actions taken by the Federal Reserve.
'The biggest items in this category come from Social Security and Medicare which, if current policy is maintained, will require enormous sacrifices from future taxpayers,' Hamilton wrote.
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