There was a great piece in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday on why the U.S. government can’t tax itself out of debt.

Authors Chris Cox and Bill Archer, both former Republican congressmen, say the official figure of $16 trillion in national debt is a sham. The real number is about $87 trillion – or 550% of GDP as they note -- when all the liabilities of the federal government, including Social Security, Medicare and federal employees’ future retirement benefits are included in the equation.

How can this happen?

For years, the government has gotten by without having to produce the kind of financial statements that are required of most significant for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. The U.S. Treasury ‘balance sheet’ does list liabilities such as Treasury debt issued to the public, federal employee pensions, and post-retirement health benefits. But it does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Social Security and other outsized and very real obligations.

As a result, fiscal policy discussions generally focus on current-year budget deficits, the accumulated national debt, and the relationships between these two items and gross domestic product.

The federal government isn’t the only one hiding its real obligations. States do the same thing, making it seem as if they are much better off than facts reveal. In Maryland, for example, officially the budget is balanced this year. Officially it also has a structural deficit for Fiscal 2014 of about $700 million. But that is only a tiny fraction of its total debt.

As the non-partisan nonprofit State Budget Solutions estimates, Maryland’s total liabilities are about $82 billion when its pension and other future retirement obligations to state employees are included in its debt. That works out to $14,022 per person in the state.

Other states have more total overall debt, but Maryland ranks up there with some of the most financially strapped states like California and New York on a per capita basis. Per capita debt in California, for example, is $16,386 and in New York, $15,415.

The massive chasm between official estimates of state debt and actual burdens reveal state government for what it has become: a giant Ponzi scheme.

The fact that the government hides it from residents through opaque accounting has allowed elected officials to push the day of reckoning back. But no tax hikes or casino revenue will be able to fill the hole created by years of spending more than the state received in revenue and by promising benefits that had no connection to taxpayers’ ability to pay them.

When the bill comes due it won’t just be the “wealthy” forced to pay higher taxes, it will be everyone. And the subsidized lifestyle enjoyed by so many in Maryland thanks to the federal government will make the situation here even more of a shock.