Is the True US Deficit $76 Trillion Instead of $16 Trillion

Bill Gross is the lead investment manager for PIMCO which is probably the largest Bond Fund company is the US or the world.  Every month, he writes an Investment Outlook letter to their investors and this month’s letter was entitled “Damages“. 

In the letter, he recaps the countries whose deficit is large as a percentage of their GDP and those who are small.  It is probably not surprising that Greece, Japan, Spain have large deficits, however, the US deficit as a percent of GDP is actually larger than any of the countries other than Japan.

The lesser developed countries such as China, Russia, etc. are much lower and those countries such as Germany and Canada who have gotten their fiscal house in order are much lower too.

The final couple of paragraphs deal with the current total US deficit of $16 Trillion, however, if you add the present value of all of the benefits owed due to Social Security, the deficit becomes closer to $76 Trillion.  Now payroll taxes will cover much of that, but it is interesting to see that the US may not be much better than the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries.