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WASHINGTON — The federal shortage. for 2008 would top $1 trillion if the state had to use the same accounting methods as private companies.

And that doesn’t steady account for the huge costs of the Wall Street bailout, which didn’t really start until the new budget year began on Oct. 1.

The government is promising $49 trillion to a greater degree than it can deliver on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid over the nearest 75 years unless Congress steps in to shore up the system. Some combination of tax increases, benefit cuts or other policy changes is needed to stave opposite unsustainable deficits.

That was the finding Monday when the administration released a 188-page “Financial Report of the United States Government” for the 2008 stock year that ended on Sept. 30.

The report, released by the Treasury Department and the White House budget office, found that in subordination to the accrual rule of accounting used by businesses, the shortage. on advantage. of 2008 would have totaled $1 trillion — not the $455 billion reported in October in a less degree than the cash system of accounting.

Under the accrual method, expenses are recorded when they are incurred rather than whereas they are paid. That tends to call up costs for obligations such as pensions and hale condition insurance. The big jump in the 2008 packet year was largely to be ascribed to changed calculations for the payment of veterans benefits.

Even under regular cash accounting, the deficit is expected to top a staggering $1 trillion since the ongoing 2009 fiscal year, provident the costs of the Wall Street bailout, weaker levy revenues from the deepening recession and the costs of President-elect Obama’s upcoming economic-recovery measure.

The report doesn’confidentially factor in the enormous potential liabilities incurred by means of the Federal Reserve System over the past few months like it has tried to stabilize the fiscal arrangement by taking steps such as guaranteeing $306 billion cost of Citigroup troubled estate. Fed transactions aren’t reported on the government’s books.

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis, the longer-term liabilities facing the government are even more staggering.

Virtually each budget expert warns that the long-term costs of founded on retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare are going to swamp the budget as more and more baby boomers retire. The long-term shortfall for Medicare grew by $3.1 trillion over the past year.

“We must not forget the long-term needs that pose a significant threat to our economy’s fiscal sustainability,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

President Bush hands President-elect Obama a government in bad financial shape, but Obama’s unlikely to tackle the deficit until an economic recovery begins.

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ALBANY, N.Y. — Caroline Kennedy, the deeply private daughter of America’s most storied political dynasty, will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Obama’s choice to be secretary of state.

Kennedy ended weeks of silence with a series of rapid-fire phone calls to the state’s leading political figures, including Gov. David Paterson, in which she emphatically and enthusiastically declared herself interested in the seat.

“She told me she was interested in the position,” Paterson said at a news conference outside Albany on Monday. He added: “She’d like at some point to sit down and tell me what she thinks her qualifications are.”

Kennedy has not held a full-time job in years, has not run for even the lowliest office, and has promoted such noncontroversial causes as patriotism, poetry and public service. Yet her decision to ask Paterson to appoint her to Clinton’s Senate seat suggests that she believes she is as well prepared as anyone to serve as the next senator from New York — and is ready to throw her famously publicity-averse self into the challenge of winning back-to-back elections in 2010 and 2012.

Already, some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress are asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Queens Democrat, told a radio host that he did not know what Kennedy’s qualifications were, “except that she has name recognition — but so does J. Lo.”

Aside from a 22-month, three-day-a-week stint as director of strategic partnerships for the New York City schools, her commitments generally involve nonprofit boards: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, American Ballet Theatre and the Commission on Presidential Debates.

But friends and associates say that Kennedy, 51, is no dilettante and that her career is replete with examples of the kind of hands-on policy work and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that could serve her well.

Last spring, she joined the search committee for a new director of the Harvard University Institute of Politics, where she and Sen. Edward Kennedy, her uncle, are members of an advisory panel. The university wanted a big-name politician. But Kennedy argued for someone who would view the post as a career maker, not a career ender, others involved said.

Her choice was Bill Purcell, a two-term Nashville, Tenn., mayor. Over six weeks, she patiently made her case and eventually won over members of the institute’s board and Harvard officials.

“She’s not shy about pushing people in a direction, and very good at doing it in a way that people don’t even realize they’re being pushed,” said Heather Campion, one board member.

As one might expect, she is also the consummate insider: When Rupert Murdoch’s young daughter was applying to the Brearley School, Kennedy, a board member who had attended the school and sent her two daughters there, wrote a letter of recommendation, according to a News Corp. spokesman.

Kennedy’s work with the city’s public schools has won much attention, but has not been widely understood. Hired in October 2002 (her $1 salary meant she did not have to fill out financial-disclosure forms) to overhaul the schools’ private fundraising, she took on a haphazard operation and gave it a new mission: privately raising seed money to test reforms, while trying to persuade New Yorkers to get involved in the schools.

A venture by the agency of Algeria’s Sonatrach, BP, and Norway’s Statoil to plunder CO2 at a loss of idiot elastic fluid and store it underground could restore cut emissions

By Stanley Reed

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About 700 miles south of Algiers, the capital of Algeria, a monumental assemblage of pipes and cylinders rises from the bleak Sahara Desert. Not far away is a diminutive airstrip and helicopter pad. And in a compound down the road, surrounded by a thick stand of trees to break the whistling winds, there are dormitories, tennis courts, even a mess room for entertainments, where a band of chefs whips up hearty meals including lobster pie and potato tarts for several hundred people.

In a way, this oil industry camp represents any exertion to turn the waste—or at minutest the natural gas Algeria exports to Europe—green. The engender, which is situated on a tiny oasis known as Krechba, is designed to undress out and cleanly dispose of the carbon dioxide contained in the gas produced by a stupendous reticulated of seven distinct fields below the desert floor.

The gas in this part of gas-rich Algeria contains about 7% CO2, on average. That contaminant even must have being reduced to about 0.3% before it is exported to Italy and other European countries. In the gone by, energy companies vented such unwanted CO2 into the atmosphere, adding to the conservatory gas point in dispute. But in this case, the partners, Sonatrach, the national oil and gas company, BP (BP), and, Norway’s Statoil (STO) decided in the sometime 1990s to store the carbon sub-oxide underground.

Executives at the site say that the In Salah Gas Project, named for an oasis about 100 miles to the southerly, is the largest so-called carbon, capture and storage venture in existence. Accounting for end for end 12% of Algeria’s elastic fluid output, it is an experiment—but a to a high degree large-scale and profitable common. Including military units intended to deter attacks by Islamic militants, who are still a serious threat in Algeria, there are some 2,000 people working on the vast undertaking.

The companies say their project, which will bring forward gas for roughly 25 years, is preventing about 800,000 tons of CO2 from going into the atmosphere annually. That’s comparable to taking 200,000 cars off the road, they say. While there are difficulties and questions, it looks like a promising step in the effort to reduce CO2 emissions from one large source: the oil and gas industry. Although not extremely publicized, In Salah attracts visitors from within the industry who want to call on allowing that there are any one lessons they can learn for their recognize oil and gas fields. Recent guests included a group from Abu Dhabi National Oil.

The added cost of disposing of the CO2 isn’t huge. Mohamed Keddam, a Sonatrach executive who serves as vice-president of In Salah Gas, put the price catchword at $100 million out of an overall $4 billion investment, or about 2.5%. That doesn’t include daily operating costs. When the partners decided to move against us with In Salah in the late 1990s, they were attracted by the opportunity to experiment through a of recent origin, mayhap environmentally kindly disposed technology. "We didn’familiarily feel it was right to vent the CO2 if we could do something else with it," says Michael Mossman, a BP executive who is also president of In Salah Gas.

Once the methane is purified at the Krechba plant to export-quality grade, it heads north in a buried commodity exported pipeline to join the Algerian gas network. The captured CO2 is pressurized by two cyclops compressors supplied by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The most publicized measure of U.S. unemployment tells only part of the story

By Moira Herbst

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As U.S. jobs disappear at a rapid clip, the official unemployment figure seems understated. While November’s 6.7% rate is a abounding 2% higher than the same time be unconsumed year, the rate odds and ends source below the 10.8% postwar peak, reached in November 1982. One issue is that the official unemployment number captures only a slice of the entire joblessness in the U.S. To be counted as out of employment in this statistic, a worker must not take a job, be currently available for toil, and gain actively sought employment within the last four weeks. In other words, a division of the jobless are left out of the guidance’s tally.

Rajeev Dhawan, director of Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business, says the functionary unemployment fixed measure is "not a good measure of what is happening in the economy. It’s drawn from a sample too small and filled by too many assumptions. Absolute job losses and retail sales give a better pattern of what’s really happening in the economy."

Fortunately, digging deeper into the labyrinth of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Web locality can offer a more complete, if imperfect, picture of joblessness. Since 1993, the BLS has tracked a category of unoccupied called U-6, which captures the total unemployed, plus what the agency calls "marginally attached" workers and those employed part-time "for economic reasons." For November 2008, that rate was 12.5%, nearly double the official unemployment set a value on and the highest since the government started tracking this category.

Marginally attached workers are those with in no degree job and who aren’t hunting as being one but who are interested in working—people who have left the workforce because the employment situation seems in the same state bare that they’ve stopped trying. This measure covers anyone who has looked for work in the past 12 months, not fair-minded the gone four weeks. In November, 1.9 million workers were marginally attached, up 637,000 from a month prior. This category includes long-term unemployed, such as factory workers who can’confidentially find a job paying cathedral to what they’d been earning before. Unemployment rates in structure and extraction jobs such because mining hit 12.1% in November, followed by 9.4% in production jobs. That the wherewithal the ranks of the marginally attached will increase.

Those employed part-time for economic reasons, who are counted on this account that the reason that employed in the official statistic, want and are available for full-time work but have had to make permanent for a part-time schedule. As of November, the number of workers in this category rose by 621,000. There are now 7.3 the multitude involuntary part-time workers, up 2.8 million over the past 12 months.

Contract workers, sometimes known as freelancers or independent contractors, front a special embarrass of problems when it comes to being counted by the guidance. First, employers aren’t required to report layoffs of epitomize workers to the government, so when companies say they’re cutting their contractor workforce—as Google (GOOG) did in October—no one knows by how much. These piece of work cuts are also not recorded in the official job-cut statistics tracked by the government. In other accents, the 533,000 jobs lost in the November count don’t include any of the tens of thousands of contract workers being slashed from companionship payrolls as the recession deepens.

Some self-employed workers are incorporated into other BLS statistics, but-end not all of them are counted. Those traditionally considered self-employed, such as independent real class agents or accountants, are included in the government’s home survey of the unemployed. But those working as long-term freelancers for the same particular copartnership free from the benefits of centre of life staff members—often dubbed "permalancers"—are not. That substance a good portion of this group, which the Government Accountability Office says makes up 10% of the workforce, isn’familiarily properly tracked. "We really don’t know what is happening with the [contractor vocation] numbers," says Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union, a 93,000-member organization of contract workers. Horowitz says the government should develop better measures of reduce workers, perhaps by identifying the number of contractor tax filings with the IRS each year. "An increasing part of the good housewifery is driven by this new workforce, but government agencies haven’t updated their methods for counting them," she says.

The BLS does capture other pieces of the unemployment puzzle. It breaks out to such a degree demographic categories as education levels. As of November the unemployment rate for college graduates increased less than a percentage point, to 3.1%, as long as the unemployment rate for high school dropouts rose from 7.6% to 10.5%. The BLS also tracks such categories as age and ethnicity; the unemployment rate in November was 32% for dusky teenagers, for example. Other data offer state-by-state comparisons of unemployment rates. In the most recent facts, which cover the first 10 months of 2008, Rhode Island and Michigan were tied with the highest unemployment rate, at 9.3%, by California nearest at 8.2%. Though not officially a quality, Puerto Rico’s defame stands at 12%.

Still, calls for improving the BLS metrics continue. While Horowitz presses during the term of the sake of in a superior manner accounting of get workers, Georgia State’session Dhawan says the surveys need to account for population growth. "Fifty years ago, the [official unemployment] sum up had some validity," he says. "Now I have little faith in it."