As I said, the last President that the curve didn’t apply to was Hoover, but the exponential to the left of 1980 wasn’t anything to worry about. The problem was politicians starting in the late 1970’s should have started to deal with their addiction to spending borrowed money.
WE should have dealt with their addiction to spending money.
It’s not too late (I hope).
But it will be more and more painful the longer we wait…
This has tracked fairly steadily, which is a good sign. You can see it shoot up around 2008 when we spent tons on the recovery, but it’s started to level off again.
Note that this graph appears to have been normalized so that the two graphs endpoints are in the same place. That’s not an indication that we’re about to ‘crossover’ anything.
Did you see the quote on that graph I posted? The people don’t want to control spending since they are getting handouts from it.
Yes. I saw it.
Regarding the above graph, we HAVE actually crossed over so that debt is now greater than GDP/yr. So, there’s that.
Nobody has said anything about a cross over. Debt as a function of GDP is a poor criteria. And in neither your case nor mine did we include ALL of the national debt. There is a huge category (about 10X) called unfunded liabilities which the government owes, but which they are playing accounting games.
The debt is a problem, the fact that we haven’t had a single year in more then your lifetime where the government spent less then it took in in revenue is a problem.
Yes.
But.
“The people” is a sweeping generalization.
SOME of “the people” DO want to control spending. Some are not getting handouts. Although some of THOSE probably use public roads or other technology they did not build, so…
Ah, that’s not true. The national debt went down in 2000.
I like the policy: If you get a direct benefit from the government which is not available equally to all, you can’t vote on that benefit.
Sorry, but you are wrong. The data I used for my graph was from the Treasury Department. It went back to 1970 and showed an increase in the National debt for every year.
Even better, weight your vote based upon your net contribution to the National coffers.
so what you’re saying is the gov should stay out of the automotive business and secure the borders…
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I have been looking for 15 minutes, and the only thing that even comes close to explaining how there could be an increase in federal debt during years of budget surplus is this:
Like with a lot of things, I guess it depends on how you count the money.
Or how much of it you print.
@wandrson , quick, find us a graph of money printing vs. money counting!!!
Your problem is your trusting the claims there was a budget surplus. If the debt increased, there wasn’t a budget surplus. And the Treasury says the debt increased.
Politicians and accountants like to play games with numbers.
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I think you have that backwards. You can go back and show that tax receipts were greater than expenditures. It was widely reported at the time, and it’s extremely well documented from newspapers and writings from the time. Hell, even Cato has a paper talking about how it wasn’t Clinton that was responsible for the budget surplus. (Implying that even ultra-conservative Cato is forced to acknowledge the surplus)
I am sorry, but you can’t bend history to fit your world view. It happened, there was a surplus in cash.
When we get conflicting information like this, it is upon us as citizens to understand why the numbers don’t line up, and what factors we don’t understand went into those numbers.
In this case, I do suspect it is the treasury taking future liability into account immediately. While some shady accountants do play games with numbers, in other cases, totally legitimate accounting practices can seem to be intentionally obfuscating things when that is not the case. I’ve come to appreciate just how complex accounting is, and I have more respect for it as a tool to understand and control complicated data rather than a way to get “hard facts”.
Nope I don’t have it backwards. There are all kinds of accounting games you can play with revenue and expenses. But your creditors are certain to insist you account for your debt to them.
Time for a moderator to split this to a new “Off Topic” topic! 
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No your wrong. Future liabilities are in excess of 150 trillion dollars, or about ten times the national debt. The difference was the Clinton’s weren’t including the debt service costs in their calculation of expenditures-- which is as I said a shell game. They spent more then they took in like everyone since Hoover.
So did this last, tangential bit here get moved to a different thread?
I ask instead of looking because I can’t decide whether I’d actually want to find it. On one hand, I don’t slow down with the rest of traffic when driving by accident scenes, so I feel like I’ve earned enough karma to want to watch. On the other, as an erstwhile high school government teacher (you can tell because we use words like “erstwhile”), reading this discussion and thinking that people may actually think there was accurate or useful information presented somewhere in there makes me cry a little inside. (Probably more than a little.) #moraldilemma