So, the U.S. national debt is nearly $26 trillion, I've heard you say, what does that mean

to people? Like, is there any way you can kind of give people a comparison as far as why

that is potentially a dangerous number? Well, first of all, it's the tip of the iceberg

because that is only the treasury debt that's outstanding. So that's bonded, funded debt,

where the government has borrowed money and issued a formal IOU in the form of a treasury security.

But those are not the only debts that the U.S. government is obligated to repay. If you look

at all of the debt that we're on the hook for, the unfunded liabilities, which would include

commitments to pay, so security benefits, Medicare benefits, pensions to government retirees.

And then if you look at a lot of debt that the U.S. government has guaranteed,

such as student loans or mortgages or things like that, and you try to ascribe

some type of liability for that because we know that some of the debts are going to go bad

and that the government is going to be on the hook based on its prior commitments. So if you

actually take a fair accounting of the unfunded liabilities, there you're talking about like

150 trillion dollars. So you're talking about a number that is more than five times greater

than the official national debt that we're talking about when you're talking about this

26 trillion dollars. But to put that 26 trillion in perspective, that's about eight years

of the current tax revenue. That's eight years of taxation. That's to repay that debt,

which obviously shows you that the debt is completely unrepairable. There's no way to do that

because that's eight years of tax revenue where the government spends nothing on anything else,

which is impossible. The government can't spend zero in order to repay its debt. If you look at it

as a percentage of GDP right now, we're at about 120 percent of GDP the size of that debt. But of

course, American taxpayers are also on the hook for the debts of the state and local government.

...