Dismissing official federal debt figures out of hand as misleading âfiscal labeling,â Kotlikoff estimates that our true fiscal gap is a staggering $202 trillion â about 15 times the âofficialâ debt level pronounced by government statisticians. The reason for this vast discrepancy is the scurrilous practice â used by the federal government to conceal real levels of indebtedness ââ of declaring certain liabilities, like Social Security and Medicare payouts, as âoff budget.â It's as though these are not enormous sums of money that the federal government has committed to pay out over the next couple of decades as waves of Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers retire. Full article....................... http://www.thenewamerican.com/index...true-federal-debt-202-trillion-kotlikoff-says