{"id":556723,"date":"2026-03-24T04:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T04:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/556723\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T04:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T04:27:12","slug":"the-united-states-is-insolvent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/556723\/","title":{"rendered":"The United States is Insolvent"},"content":{"rendered":"

FORTUNE Magazine, not exactly a radical left-wing progressive commie rag, has this story up today:\u00a0The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it<\/a><\/p>\n

The U.S. government is insolvent. That\u2019s not hyperbole \u2014 it\u2019s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department\u2019s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025. [not including social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare] . . . .<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).<\/p>\n

The authors,\u00a0Steve H. Hanke<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0David M. Walker<\/a>,\u00a0are a professor of applied economics and a former comptroller general of the United States, so they have street cred. They are, for the moment, correct that no other media seem to have picked up the story, though I did find this one from last May:\u00a0The United States is insolvent, not bankrupt – yet<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The United States is insolvent. That\u2019s not hyperbole, it\u2019s a financial fact. We\u2019re not bankrupt, at least not yet, and there\u2019s a big difference between the two. Insolvency is when you can\u2019t pay your bills when they\u2019re due. When you can\u2019t pay your bills and you can\u2019t borrow the money to cover them, then you are bankrupt.<\/p>\n

Les Rubin\u2019s column, however, uses general numbers while the FORTUNE story is based on the official Treasury report. There\u2019s no link in the article, but I did find this:\u00a0Financial Statements of the United States Government for the Fiscal Years Ended September 30, 2025, and 2024<\/a>\u00a0(PDF from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service). You have to scroll down a lot of pages, and I\u2019m not an economist or accountant, so I may have missed a lot. But this one did jump out at me:<\/p>\n

Balance sheets (page 65):<\/p>\n

Net Position:
Funds from Dedicated Collections (Note 22)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 3,545.9\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 3,707.3
Funds other than those from Dedicated Collections\u00a0 (45,269.3)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(43,356.6)
Total net position\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(41,723.4)\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(39,649.3)
Total liabilities and net position\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 6,055.4\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 5,683.8<\/p>\n

Columns are 2025 and 2024 (left to right), and amounts are in billions of dollars. This is approximately (as best I can tell) where the FORTUNE story got most of their numbers: \u201c$6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guess what, folks: We\u2019re broke. And the Treasury just admitted it (65 pages in). The narrative pages of the report\u00a0 don\u2019t say that, of course; they just explain what each section shows and where the data comes from; a relatively quick skim found no analysis.<\/p>\n

The FORTUNE authors acknowledge this is not easy reading:<\/p>\n

Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that\u2019s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.<\/p>\n

So they divided the numbers by 100 million and presented this example:<\/p>\n

That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 \u2014 running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.<\/p>\n

The authors want a \u201cFiscal Commission Act,\u201d proposed in Congress, which would<\/p>\n

force a public reckoning with the facts, the trade-offs, and the hard choices that restoring fiscal health requires.<\/p>\n

That sounds reasonable. Their other suggestion \u2014\u00a0an Art. V convention to write a balanced budget amendment \u2014\u00a0is just nuts. Just the amendment alone would be a invitation to disaster. And a Constitutional Convention is guaranteed to lead to all kinds of mischief, starting with declaring the US to be a \u201cChristian nation.\u201d NO. They are, at least, correct on this\u00a0 point:<\/p>\n

Congress has clearly lost control of the nation\u2019s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

Not just Congress, though its dereliction of duty ranks high on the list of causes. The Trump administration has been (a) cutting taxes for all those those who can afford them and also (b) cutting projects (illegally) that it doesn\u2019t like or that don\u2019t benefit them while (c) spending money like a drunken sailor on personal pet projects, projects they\u2019ve been \u201curged\u201d to support, and of course war. Nothing like a good rousing war to get the blood going, erections rising, and money flowing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORTUNE Magazine, not exactly a radical left-wing progressive commie rag, has this story up today:\u00a0The Treasury just declared…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":["post-556723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}