Last week in my blog post, Pensions are not Free, I was pretty hard on the accounting profession and worried about our national pension liability.

This is another, more positive way to think about it:

The Federal Government has a debt of about twelve trillion dollars.  Which sounds like a lot.  But if you do the math is about forty thousand dollars per person.  The debt is like a mortgage on the national wealth.  In this light it doesn’t seem to be unusually highly leveraged.  What are the Federal  Governments assets worth?  It is hard to tell since they are not liquid and many of them are intangible.  What is our “rule of law” worth? How much would it cost to rebuild the interstate highway system?

A billion dollar dam?

But there might be a lot of people who would pay much more than $40,000 to move here.  It seems that our birthright gives us a very good deal.