Why isn't this a big scandal resulting in a call for heads to roll and jail time to be served?
The federal government's long-term financial obligations grew by $2.5 trillion last year, a reflection of the mushrooming cost of Medicare and Social Security benefits as more baby boomers reach retirement.
That's double the red ink of a year earlier.
Taxpayers are on the hook for a record $57.3 trillion in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, a USA TODAY analysis found. That's nearly $500,000 per household.
[. . .]
We're running deficits in the trillions of dollars, not the hundreds of billions of dollars we're being told," says Sheila Weinberg, chief executive of the Institute for Truth in Accounting of Chicago.
The reason for the discrepancy: Accounting standards require corporations and state governments to count new financial obligations, even if the payments will be made later. The federal government doesn't follow that rule. Instead of counting lifetime benefits for programs such as Social Security, the government counts the cost of benefits for the current year.
If this were done in private business, heads would roll. But we just keep sending the same old reprobates back to keep doing the same old thing. And we're about to elect a president -- doesn't matter which one of the candidates ends up winning -- who will add even more to those deficits, aided by a Congress that . . .
. . .oh, never mind.
