Study: True size of federal government debt is $210 trillion

The Washington Examiner reports:

U.S. government debt stands at $210 trillion, not the official $13.1 trillion, according to a new working paper published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. That's equivalent to $654,205 per person in the United States, 16 times higher than the current official level.

The paper was authored by Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University, and Adam Michel with the Mercatus Center. Rather than examine how much debt the government has now, they included how much debt the government will take on in the future.

Fixing the problem will be an enormous undertaking. "No adjustment that sufficiently addresses the US government's enormous fiscal gap will be small," Kotlikoff and Michel wrote. "To eliminate the shortfall solely through tax increases, the government would have to immediately and permanently raise all federal taxes — personal and corporate income taxes, excise taxes, and Social Security taxes — by 58 percent."

Just a reminder.