The federal government’s economic update was released the other day, complete with the eye-catching proposal to be "debt-free" by 2021. I don’t know what’s worse: that the Conservatives expected it to be swallowed, or the fact that some journalists did.

It turns out that the measure of debt they’re talking about is "net debt", which counts pension assets, but which doesn’t count pension liabilities. I don’t know about you, but when a government starts paying attention to a debt measure that ignores pension obligations, I get nervous.