Can one of the board economics gurus put this in plain speak for me?

Furor said

The public debt, taking into account the Social Security and Gov't trust funds surpluses, is just over $5 trillion. By percentage of gross domestic product, it's about 36%. Some countries that are in worse shape debt-wise than the US: Norway, Sweden, UK, Brazil, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada (64% of GPD) and 57 other ones.

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To be fair, the Government owes social security and medicare nearly $50 trillion bucks by the year 2040. Include this into the statistics and we don't look as statistically healthy. Also something to consider is the current rate of spending we are going to increase our total debt by another $1 trillion this year alone.

Where did you get the $5 trillion dollar number? Everywhere I read it is $9 trillion and $59 trillion after Social Security and Medicare are factored in.

Also now that the growth has slowed the GDP should decrease or stay the same. Statistically we will be much worse off. We are the greatest economic country in the history of the world, there is no reason we should be running a 36% public debt anyway.