What would you say if the federal government found a $44 trillion funding gap — a figure bigger than the entire world’s combined annual gross domestic product — and instead of publishing its findings, the government sought to cover such a report up?

An article in the November 24th issue of Fortune magazine entitled “The $44 Trillion Abyss” details a report commissioned by then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to estimate America’s preparedness to pay for the high cost of entitlements for retiring baby boomers. The results presented by the two expert economists (Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale) were so shocking that the report was never unveiled. Instead, O’Neill was sacked and the report was buried until Smetters and Gokhlae finally published their findings in a journal put out by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The findings prove shocking beyond belief. Using a method of budget estimation known as “generational accounting” pioneered by Boston University economics chair Larry Kotlikoff, Smetters and Gokhale were able to estimate the accumulated cost of America’s future entitlement spending commitments in a manner similar to retirement planning.

Using the optimistic assumptions provided by the government’s budget of a mere one percent annual growth in medical costs (as compared to a projected three percent growth in the GDP), Smetters and Gokhale calculated a $44.2 trillion funding gap in Medicare and Social Security. Using a less rosy estimate of 1.5 percent growth in medical costs annually, the deficit jumps to $65 trillion — nearly ten times the amount of the current national debt.

Smetters and Gokhlae estimated that to close such a gap would involve “a 69 percent hike in all federal taxes or a 95 percent increase in payroll taxes[…] or a 45 percent cut to Social Security and Medicare” — or any combination of the above. If this budgetary catastrophe continues on its current course of derailment, today’s generation of Americans can look forward to a future of living in virtual indentured servitude or witness the financial collapse of America into a third-world nation.

It gets worse. Each year that Republicans and Democrats waste oxygen bickering about how many new entitlements should be handed out to today’s recipients, the entitlement deficit grows by a yawning $1.6 trillion. In four years’ time, this is equivalent to doubling the national debt — for which interest payments alone already consume over $115 billion in interest payments every year. While the entitlement funding gap is much like the national debt in the sense that it will never come due all in one day, the actual costs of it are quite real and will be coming from your paychecks.

What this amounts to is a massive betrayal of our generation bordering on treason. For the sake of keeping their jobs, both Republicans and Democrats have sold us into fiscal slavery for benefits our generation can count on never seeing. Instead of realistically addressing the issues of increasing life expectancies, exploding medical costs and a declining worker pool, both parties in Congress have acted only in their own political self-interest, handing out a new Medicare prescription drug benefit that Kotlikoff estimated to cost anywhere between $400 billion to $1 trillion over the next decade — and add another $6 trillion to the already unfathomable $44 billion entitlement funding gap.

Kotlikoff agrees, calling the matter “the great Treasury cover-up.”

Yet the Democratic presidential contenders and President Bush have offered us no solution for this massive entitlement gap. Their only quibble has been over the size and scope of government largess — indeed, the chief complaint by Democrats about Bush’s $400 billion Medicare bonanza has been not with how we will pay for it but the parsimony of its benefits. The fact that neither party has taken responsibility for the mess resulting from their present political opportunism is indicative of their attitude towards today’s young people — utter contempt.

Says Joe Seehusen, National Executive Director of the Libertarian Party: “Republican and Democratic politicians have betrayed America’s youth by saddling them with a crushing debt that will adversely affect them the entirety of their adult lives.”

If you’re outraged by now, it’s time to put it to good use. It is clear that the two major parties cannot be trusted to secure America’s financial future or safeguard its Constitution — which is why both deserve to be evicted from office and replaced with parties that will restore a measure of fiscal sanity.

Steve Skutnik is a graduate student in Nuclear Physics from Ames.