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Notes -
Recursive link-following from the above Forbes post says that the 210 trillion is an estimate by a cabal of right-wing economists of the NPV of future federal deficits out to an infinite horizon (as of 2015). In other words, it is a voodoo number - it is sensitively dependent on assumptions made about demographic and technological change in the 22nd century.
The up-to-date equivalent number out to the 75-year horizon used in the official Financial Report of the United States Government (see Cato commentary) is $80 trillion
The 213 trillion on the Debt Clock is given by debt ($34 trillion) + unfunded Social Security benefits ($27 trillion) + unfunded Medicare benefits ($41 trillion) + unfunded federal employee pensions (including veterans' benefits). The debt clock doesn't give a number for the employee benefits, but the official number is about $13 trillion. It looks like the reason why the numbers don't add up is that the debt clock people are using the 75-year horizon for the SS and Medicare numbers given in isolation, but the infinite horizon numbers (which, for those two programmes only, are official US Treasury numbers) as part of the grand total.
Those big scary SS/Medicare numbers are not "liabilities" in an accounting sense - the debt clock misleadingly describe them as GAAP numbers, but a private-sector organisation with underfunded pension liabilities would account for them very differently under GAAP. They are just NPVs of future cashflows - in the case of Medicare parts B and D which are funded on a PAYG basis, the "unfunded liability" is just a projected NPV of gross spending. A private sector GAAP analysis would only count a liability for accrued benefits - i.e. benefits that were "earned" through taxes paid in the past that will be paid in the future. An NPV analysis includes pensions that will be paid to people who haven't started working yet. In particular, the SS projections assume that people who are now under 15 or not yet born will get more out of SS than they pay in to the tune of $17 trillion, and include that as a "liability".
If I am correct about the debt clock methodology, the two numbers are similar because the largest component of both is infinite-horizon projections of SS and Medicare spending, where they both use the same official Treasury estimates.
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