Policy Report: Running Out of Other People’s Money
That gap is the “unfunded liability” or “implicit debt” for those programs.
Implicit debt, of course, represents the “softest” form of debt, in that there is no legal requirement to pay all the promised benefits. But “soft” does not mean debt that can be completely dismissed. Those benefit payments are called for under current law, and it would take congressional action to change them. Unless and until Congress does so, those obligations exist. That is why, for private companies, future promises to pay benefits are generally categorized as debt according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and other accounting authorities. If the government was required to report its debt in the same way public companies do, those promises would show up as debt.
Social Security’s future unfunded obligations now run to more than $24.9 trillion. Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are more difficult to nail down, in part because of the uncertainty brought about by the new health care reform law. In 2009, Medicare’s trustees estimated that the program’s unfunded liabilities were $88.9 trillion. Since then, health care inflation has been running at a slower rate. Economists debate the reason for this decline and whether it will continue, but it has resulted in a reduction of Medicare’s unfunded liabilities to just (!) $47.6 trillion. Thus, the real combined federal debt (debt held by public + intragovernmental debt + implicit debt) actually totals at least $90.5 trillion. That’s real money—even in Washington— roughly $282,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Students graduating from college today worry about their college debt…. That’s nothing compared with what they owe as a share of the country’s debt.
Moreover, these projections assume that interest rates on government debt remain somewhere near current levels, which is about 2 percent. The CBO points out that, even at this low rate, interest on the debt is becoming an ever larger portion of federal spending. This year, the federal government will pay $229 billion in interest charges. By 2024, with just a modest expected increase in interest rates, that will rise to more than $808 billion. Not long afterward, we will be paying a trillion dollars every year just for interest on the debt. By 2035, in fact, interest on the debt will be tied with Medicare as the second-largest line item in the federal budget, trailing only Social Security.
And interest rates may not stay this low. It is estimated that every 1 percent increase in interest rates adds as much as $1 trillion in additional interest payments over the next decade. Over the past two decades the average rate of interest on government debt has been roughly 5.7 percent. Therefore, if interest rates were to return to anything close to traditional levels, it would add trillions to our future obligations.
