Recommended: U.S. deficit forecast masks true scope of problem

Reuters Online today has an interesting short piece entitled
U.S. deficit forecast masks true scope of problem. It makes the point yet again (with numbers) that Congress and the administration are doing their best to cover up and keep from the public a very serious fiscal problem, by playing the same accounting games the government has been playing for decades, under both Republicans and Democrats.

The future liabilities for Social Security and especially for Medicare are truly staggering -- $107 TRILLION as of 2009. That is about seven times the size of the U.S. economy and 10 times the size of the outstanding national debt. The nation's finances are already in worse shape than Greece's finances, and we are only insulated from a Greek-style crisis by the fact that the world is still willing to loan us money at low interest by buying our Treasury bonds. That cannot continue indefinitely, and when they stop buying our bonds, or begin to demand a much higher interest rate, we will be in "deep kimshe" (translation: a world of hurt) very quickly.

I can't help but be annoyed that the Washington political elite that got us into this mess (both parties, this is not a Republican vs Democrat thing) are absolutely insulated from the effects of their bad decisions. There is absolutely no accountability for members of Congress, all of whom have their own generous pensions and health plans unaffected by the chaos their poor decisions have created for the rest of us. I can't help but be annoyed, for example, that House Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank (D. Mass) is still pontificating about how Bush created the fiscal crisis, when it was he himself who blocked the Bush administration's attempts to regulate Fanny Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddi Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), the institutions that set off the whole crisis by massively buying subprime mortgages (as they were instructed to do by Congress, especially Rep. Barney Frank).