USA's looming disaster worse than Greece? You betcha!

Lawrence Kotlikoff has a disturbing column in the Financial Times today. He argues that the United States is in as bad a shape as Greece. In truth our bankruptcy is hidden only because the World has no good alternative to using our soon to be worth less (not worthless) paper. Our Federal "leaders" have taken the magic money machine that was created by the spectacularly productive and enormous US economy and have used it to buy votes for the past 50 years. Both parties. The result of such callous indifference to our children and grand-children's future has resulted in a situation where the Feds have no choice but to rip someone off - either the bondholders who will get their assets inflated away, the beneficiaries who will have their subsidies slashed or tax payers who will be forced to pay far more for less benefit than their parents got. But the lies have been served up for so long that everyone is going to get screwed. This is what centralizing Federal Corporatism gets you - fraud, chaos, destruction.

More here: FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Uncle Sam has worse woes than Greece: "But all these countries have something to learn from the real labelling master: Uncle Sam. During the past half-century, the US has sold tens of trillions of unofficial IOUs, leaving it with liabilities to pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits that total 40 times official debt. So is US debt actually 40 times larger than reported? Is this year’s deficit 15 per cent of GDP or 9 per cent? It’s your pick, since we are in a fiscal wonderland of measurement without meaning."