Why would you include future SSA liabilities in a present-day deficit figure?  (Lift the cap on payroll taxes, and that figure is wiped out.)  I, further, don't accept the premise that these are unfunded liabilities, nor do I accept the premise that the projections on these liabilities are built on solid assumptions.  This clown wants to use government stats when they suit his political and financial agenda, but call them into question when they don't.

And this is the same game the Republicans and their little prison bitch, Joe Lieberman, play when they try to convince us that Social Security is on the verge of collapse:  Take the future obligations, cram them into present-day figures, and hope it so thoroughly scares Joe Sixpack that privatization is on the table.

I can get on board with the CPI understating inflation a fair amount.  (That graph shows 6%, not 10%.  Even deducting the necessary portion of real GDP, it wouldn't qualify as a recession.)  6% is still too high.

Are there any other sources?

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

Williams' numbers seem grotesque, but that is because we are the frogs being slowly boiled. Now the underlying issues have reached the geometric progression stage. Jerome brings up examples constantly.

Drew asked about the .75 interest rate drop in the last few months. It's a desperate attempt to keep the financial institutions working their Ponzi scheme - nothing more. It's another cycle of the virtual generation of money, and it, plus the 200 billion released by the Fed bank last month, are why M3 is jumping.

The problem with saying that removing the cap on SS contributions will lower the debt figure in short order is the political reality of actually doing that. It's true that one part of the solution to many financial issues in the U.S. is to squeeze the super-rich. Who's going to do it? Meantime, they don't know how to do anything except try to shill the system.

paul spencer