Counting the ways

"Public discussion of federal fiscal policy typically focuses on several familiar metrics of performance, including the total deficit, the level of public debt and percentage of federal spending committed to mandatory spending and net interest payments. While useful, these measures are based on accounting conventions developed years ago, and do not capture many of the ways in which the federal government now commits public resources, including obligated budget authority, guarantees associated with various government insurance programs, retirement benefits for federal workers and military personnel, and -- most substantially -- federal social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Collectively these programs and activities represent substantial and largely overlooked current commitments of future federal resources. After reviewing current measures of fiscal performance, the article presents several alternative ways to quantify federal financial performance over the first half of this decade utilizing more comprehensive measures of mounting federal financial obligations. So, for example, while the commonly reported total deficit of the federal government in FY2005 w