I have now read his report, and RT is.. lets say... inventive on how they reported the report.
First off he consistently ignores inflation for some reason. How he can compare a dollar value from 1980 to 2012 without taking inflation into consideration is a bit baffling... unless he does so and does not mention it, which would make him a fraud academically..
Secondly he lays down a considerable amount of assumptions to get to the end result.
For example on the FDIC. He argues that because of the FDIC guarantees a certain amount of deposits in banks, then that has to be taken as a liability even though the last major run on banks in the US happened before the FDIC was created and in fact that run was the reason that the FDIC was put in place. He talks moral hazard.. that because there is such a guarantee then the banks are at a higher risk of going belly up ... err what? His arguments make no sense what so ever, since the amount of bank failures and FDIC paying out the guarantee is very small because the first job of the FDIC is to sell of the assets of the bank in question and use that money to pay the guarantees.. and if there is not enough assets then the government guarantee kicks in.
He puts such very big assumptions on all the "extra" liabilities including the SS ... which is a whopper.. he says..
Such programs could be regarded as an off-balance-sheet liability if existing policies commit the government to a certain level of assistance to be offered to retirees in years to come.
In other words he does not want to commit to this one but it looks good in a spread sheet. He says that SS "could" be regarded as an off-balance-sheet liability, because the program basically exists and that some time in the future SS will pay money to old people. No mention of the income that comes into the SS fund to finance the whole thing, or the big deposits that are already there.. those are ignored.
This pattern is almost consistent through out the report. A lot of assumptions and "forgetting other aspects".. although he does state that SS and Medicare are a needed programs.. even the FDIC and Fannie and Freddie get positive mentions.
And then there is Fannie and Freddie... a puzzling one since that is money owed to the US government by the people. Far far from all the loans are bad, and those loans will be paid back. So why is it a liability? He is basically writing off half the mortgages in the US this way..
And then there is what is missing. What about contractual obligations of the US government.. like military contracts that range in the hundreds of billions?
And then there is of course no mention of assets
It is an interesting short report, that can be used by talking heads to debate, but as an actual "evidence" of massive US government debt.. it aint.