Current Financial Pictures - Caution:  These are not pretty pictures

Links to the Financial Reports of the Federal Government and Its Agencies

Read IFTA founder & CEO, Sheila Weinberg's, testimony before FASAB on Feb. 25, 2009 by clicking here.

Members of the Institute are often asked what important issues face the nation.  Here's a list of several we consider important. 

Federal:

1. The accumulating federal debt of $59 trillion dollars.  This includes explicit debt, debt internal to the federal government and the net present value of the current statutory entitlements.  What's worse, the debt grows more than $5 trillion last year.
2. The aging baby-boomers will put extraordinary pressure on the nation's economy as they begin to collect on the social programs to which they are entitled.  The combination of increasing medical costs, the extension of life expectancies and the sheer number of beneficiaries makes this situation unsustainable.
3. The trade imbalance with the rest of the world.  Essentially we are consuming more than we produce and the consequence is that we must about 1% of all the wealth America has ever accumulated to foreigners, every year.  Symptoms of this problem include a falling dollar, higher oil prices, and a long-term decline in national living standards.
4. Accounting principles and metrics our government uses to explain our financial condition are deficient and do not provide objective and comprehensive understanding of our fiscal challenges.
5. The lack of solutions to solve these problems indicates the largest problem—a lack of political will to solve them.  This leadership vacuum is the biggest challenge we face and it occurs because no constituency for sustainability exists.