Chris Cox and Bill Archer submitted a piece in the Wall Street Journal that Americans really should read. Cox is a former chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Archer is a former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and is a senior policy adviser at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

The pair says the United States is in far more trouble than most people think. Driving our well-publicized, hotly debated annual deficits are entitlement programs. They represent a small fraction of our overall debt.

That truth is that, in addition to our $17 trillion national debt, we also carry $88 trillion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

These are liabilities that the government doesn’t report. It’s money the government has promised to federal employees for their retirement and health care as well as the obligations “guaranteed” by Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

Cox and Archer — “The actual liabilities of the federal government — including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits — already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.”

The figures, they write, don’t show up in any balance sheet. They have to be extrapolated from the actuarial tables found in the annual Medicare Trustee report. From there Cox found the write-downs — $42.8 trillion (Medicare) and $20.5 trillion (Social Security).

Forget about how big you want your nanny state. There is not a way to borrow and tax enough to honor these promises.

Cox and Archer — “When the accrued expenses of the government’s entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually.

That is the total of the average annual accrued liabilities of just the two largest entitlement programs, plus the annual cash deficit.

Nothing like that $8 trillion amount is available for the IRS to target. According to the most recent tax data, all individuals filing tax returns in America and earning more than $66,193 per year have a total adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2006, when corporate taxable income peaked before the recession, all corporations in the U.S. had total income for tax purposes of $1.6 trillion. That comes to $6.7 trillion available to tax from these individuals and corporations under existing tax laws.

In short, if the government confiscated the entire adjusted gross income of these American taxpayers, plus all of the corporate taxable income in the year before the recession, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities. Some public officials and pundits claim we can dig our way out through tax increases on upper-income earners, or even all taxpayers. In reality, that would amount to bailing out the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon.”

As the authors conclude, part of the answer begins with honest reporting of these figures.

The rest of the solution?

Prepare yourself for a tough future.

— The Caledonian Record of St. Johnsbury (Vt.)