A couple of scary numbers on U.S. debt via the House GOP budget committee:

–From the Treasury Department’s 2009 Financial Report of the United States Government, which was described by Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper (Fla.) as “the only report that uses real accounting to describe America’s fiscal problems”: $62 trillion in present government obligations, including $45 trillion in unfunded obligations to Medicare and Social Security.

–From the GAO’s March 2 report: a $76.4 trillion “fiscal gap” — the difference between revenue and spending over the next 75 years that would need to be closed via tax increases and spending cuts to achieve today’s debt-to-GDP ratio — up 21.5 percent from the GAO’s last estimate less than a year ago. The report also projects that under our current trajectory, by 2020, roughly 93 cents of every dollar of Federal revenue will be spent on major entitlement programs and net interest costs.

At what point will our liabilities be expressible only in the bajillions?

More lowlights from the reports here.

UPDATE: From a reader:

No worries: the contiguous space of named numbers extends to quadragintillion (10^123). Even the if the Congress just started enacting the comments at Daily Kos it would take a while to get there.

Ha!