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Nowhere from reputable sources can I find an estimate of unfunded liabilities even close to half that number (let me know if you have one), and it seems like the alarmism is based on completely failing to describe what that number actually means.
That money is everything any government agency expects to spend on anything at all, ever.... like, in the next 50 years, or 75 years, or two hundred years. Any time someone has said 'the program will last for X years and we estimate it will pay something like $Y per year', X*Y gets added to that number, even if X=200.
So saying that 'each current citizen owes $X to pay for unfunded mandates' when most of the people who will pay for them have not been born yet, is just so transparently wrong that it flatly demonstrates someone who either doesn't understand what they are writing about, or doesn't care about misleading their audience.
And if you want to talk about the actual US debt, a plurality of the huge numbers that ussually get cited is intragovernmental debt that one department will be paying another such that the government doesn't actually lose that money when paying it, followed by debt held by US investors such that the money stays in the US when it is paid so it's not a net loss to the economy, followed by foreign investors who mostly want to use the bonds and notes the debt is held in as critical financial tools that they could not perform their own jobs if they closed out.
I'm not literate enough in this area to say that our current level of debt is good or correct or w/e. But I'm literate enough to know when alarmists are being hugely incorrect or misleading at a fundamental level, and that happens consistently enough in the alarmist arguments I encounter that I am no longer alarmed about this topic.
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