You owe $355,415

I just finished watching the movie "I.O.U.S.A." about America's addiction to debt, both privately and as a public policy to fund our overspending. It was a very balanced documentary mostly featuring former Comptroller General David Walker and it took shots at all political parties for what was called a "deficit of leadership" to match our actual deficits.

The main thing I took away from the film is that it reinforced my special obsession with the U.S. debt: the structural gap between entitlement promises and our ability to pay for them. Social Security has an unfunded liability of $14.5 trillion, the Prescription Drug Plan has a liability of $19.2 trillion, and the granddaddy Medicare has an unfunded liability of $76.4 trillion. In other words, we need over $110 trillion right now (or $355,415 per American) to pay for all this stuff and we currently have zip. Meanwhile, foreign countries are gobbling up U.S. T-bills, raising the specter of economic warfare in much the same way the United States pressured England and France during the Suez Canal crisis.

Anyway, it was a very good, eye-opening, and scary movie. But they weren't above a little humor: in the closing credits, they played Nick Lowe's "Cruel to be Kind" as a reminder that a little pain right now will help America avoid a calamitous fiscal reckoning in the future.