The Great Devaluation

3For a Few Dollars More

According to usdebtclock.org the national debt of the United States is currently $23.25 trillion. It is growing at a speed of $2 million per minute, $120 million per hour, $2.9 billion per day, and $88 billion per month. In 2019, the United States ran a deficit of over $1 trillion. Believe it or not, this runaway national debt understates the actual problem. When factoring in unfunded liabilities, the total debt of the United States is over $122 trillion today.

What exactly is an unfunded liability, you may ask? These are “promises to pay” made by our government, mostly in the form of Social Security and Medicare. An old statute requires the Treasury to issue an annual financial statement. According to the 2018 financial statement of the US Treasury, Social Security insurance alone is currently underfunded by $53.8 trillion. This level of underfunding has grown from $41.9 trillion in 2014. In the last five years, the deficit in Social Security funding has grown over $10 trillion. While our national debt is growing at $1 trillion per year, our “promises to pay” deficit is growing more than twice as fast.

We have continued to borrow from the future to pay for today. That burden has been made easier by central bank policies. Interest rates that have been manipulated to the floor allow governments to borrow even more at even lower costs. Unfortunately, this doesn't incentivize fiscal responsibility, it incentivizes the opposite. With interest rates at the ...