U.S. Financial Overview - Federal
In this section we will attempt to analyze the overall financial situation of the U.S. by agglomerating information regarding the various sectors of the government part of the economy.
The first thing that becomes obvious is how difficult it is to obtain official figures that reflect the true situation.
Typical examples:
The Federal Budget government figures do not include revenues from Social Security tax surpluses (hundreds of billions of dollars), which are transferred to the General Funds every year and spent on things other than Social Security.
The official Federal Debt doesn’t include trillions of dollars in liabilities for future payments in Social Security and Medicare.
The cost of wars (hundreds of billions of dollars) is not included in the military budget or anywhere in the Federal Budget.
An interesting May 2007 USA Today article by Dennis Cauchon gives probably one of the best analysis of the situation: The U.S. government keeps its books in a way that no corporation would be allowed to.
In fact even the Government Accounting Office warns that the U.S. government accounting is not reliable.
In this financial overview, we start with the major sections:
- The federal debt and deficit.
- The federal budget.
- The Federal Reserve Bank.
- Social Security and Medicare.
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