In a recent interview, Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff gets right to the point:

“Forget the official debt,” he tells Aaron in this clip. The “real” deficit – including non-budgetary items like unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the defense budget – is actually $202 trillion, the professor and author calculates; or 15 times the “official” numbers.

“Congress has engaged in Enron accounting,” says Kotlikoff, who recently penned an op-ed for Bloomberg entitled: The U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It.

The fact that real US debt greatly exceeds what is publicly advertised is nothing new to readers of the The Financial Panner. The “real” deficit was outlined last fall in “The Empire’s Silent Default” which was a review of Sprott Asset Management’s September 2009 investment newsletter.

What is new, however, is the growing focus on the bubble in US Treasury Bonds, which Kotlikoff also touches on: [...]

A recent book by Jim Marrs, entitled “The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy”, serves as a well documented factual reference to the financial catastrophes (and much more) which led to the September / October 2008 systemic collapse.

Even more important however, “The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy” quotes the founding fathers on the causes of the American Revolutionary War. Keep the following snippet from the book, which quotes Benjamin Franklin, in mind while reading the remainder of this newsletter:

And despite the popular myth, the American colonial revolt against England occurred more over concern for its own currency than a small tax on tea. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “…the inability of the colonists to get the power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War.” As previously discussed, wealth equals power. And the American revolutionists knew that to gain true freedom, they had to break the power of the Rothschild-dominated Bank of England, which had outlawed their money-colonial script.

Obama’s debt commission recently came out and, not surprisingly [...]