I was recently reading two articles on the United States and our mounting debt problem.  The topic has seen an increasing amount of press as our debt crisis finally comes into the spotlight.  The first article I read was on CNBC and was titled: “Listen up, candidates: Social Security is broken.”  It was not until I read the second article on How to $tuff Your Pig called: “An Idiots Question” that I really started to think about the crisis the United States faces.  How to $tuff Your Pig spoke about private debt, but I want to talk about public; an issue I find substantially more alarming.

• The issue:

The United States is 58% underfunded on all future endeavors.  That means that 58% of the money the United States has pledged nobody knows where it is going to come from.  Since the end of World War Two the United States has been the world economic superpower and yet since the 1950s our national debt has continued to rise at an alarming rate.

• The Reality:

If this issue is not fixed in the next twenty years at most; the United States will not be a world economic power.  The United States cannot keep pushing off our expenses to the next generation because eventually the gravy train has to come to a stop.  As How to $tuff Your Pig pointed out this could not have come up at a worse time as not only is the government of the United States broke so are its people with no reasonable solution insight.  The fact is when planning for retirement do not count on Social Security to be there as it alone is 32% underfunded or approximately $25.80 trillion in the red.

• Conclusion:

The question is not when will we pay it back but how because I have not heard a viable solution yet.