Prof. Antony Davies: 10 Myths About Government Debt
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Published 2017-10-16
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Myth number one, the government owes $20 trillion. How much is $20 trillion? Suppose you go to Germany, and in Germany, you go to every town. In every town, you visit every store. In every store, you look at every shelf and grab everything that is for sale. The amount of money you spend will not be $20 trillion. If you go to Germany and then to France and you go to every town, and within every town, you go to every store. In every store, you look on every shelf and you buy everything. You still will not have spent $20 trillion. You can go to England and while you’re there, you can go to the North Countries and buy everything that’s for sale, and you still will not have spent $20 trillion. In fact, to spend $20 trillion, you have to go to every country in Europe, visit every town, in every town, go to every store. In every store, look on every shelf and buy everything. And then you will have spent about $20 trillion.
But the myth is that this is how much money the government owes. It turns out that there’s more, called unfunded obligations. Unfunded obligations is money the Federal Government has promised but which it does not and will not have the money to pay. Largely, this consists of promises of retirement and medical benefits. If you would take the present value of all the future promises of retirement and medical benefits the government has made and subtract from that the amount of money that’s in the government’s Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and then subtract from that the amount of money the Federal Government anticipates collecting under the current law from future Social Security and Medicare taxes, you will still have an amount of money left over that the government does not have.
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LEARN MORE:
How Big is the U.S. Debt? (video): A stunning visual representation of the ever-growing amount of debt and unfunded liabilities being accumulated by the federal government, narrated by Prof. Antony Davies.
• How Big is the U.S. Debt? - Learn Lib...
How Should Governments Deal With Debt? (video): Nations that spend themselves into debt face very difficult choices. Prof. Steve Davies describes the three main choices that governments have to fix their debt problems.
• How Should Governments Deal With Debt?
Debts, Deficits, and Spending Cuts (video): Prof. Jeff Miron of Harvard University explains we should focus on reducing spending, rather than managing the deficit, if we want to reign-in the runaway national debt.
• Debts, Deficits, and Spending Cuts
TRANSCRIPT:
For a full transcript please visit: www.learnliberty.org/videos/10-myths-about-governm…
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