A few quick questions... (but first: Thanks for the nice charts and the substantive reply!)
#1) How is "federal debt held by the PUBLIC" reckoned? (Quoted from your first chart's label....) Does that *exclude* sovereign (foreign) ownership in it's definition of 'the public'?
#2) Regarding your comment that "The claim that the debt is "almost doubling" under this President is absurd."
Note: I NEVER claimed that relating sovereign debt loads to national product was *not* a very useful way of looking at debt loads.
ALL I SAID was that 10 Trillion was very close to a *doubling* of the debt (nominal, obviously), coming from the 5.6 Trillion debt that the nation had booked at the start of Bush's presidency.
Which, of course, most normal people would agree that it is.... (so, there would appear to be little reason to delve heavily into rhetorical flourishes and language spinning of the "depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" variety! :-)
Re: "in the context of: an inherited recession, a stock market crash, corporate scandals, a terrorist attack...."
Bad stuff happens ALL THE TIME. The business cycle (and the occasional appearance of bad news) is PERFECTLY NORMAL, to be expected, and happens over ALL extended periods of time. Trouble is to be expected and handled....
Nothing all that much 'out of the ordinary' (in a business sense) in the past decade or so, compared to EARLIER periods of similar time span.
They ALL HAVE bad events disturbing the placidity of life.
(And, as I believe I also pointed-out in my earlier post... the first year only 'recession' in Bush's first term was AMONG THE MILDEST ever recorded... and the White House's OWN TAX EXPERTS [as well as the CBO, OMB, Trend Macrolytics, etc., etc.] *all clearly told* the administration when it was considering it's tax changes and budget projections in the early years --- that by the MIDDLE OF THE DECADE, in other words... a period we are now well into..., ALL of the beneficial effects upon the growth rate of the economy that would be occasioned by Bush's proposed tax changes... would have been OVERCOME and UNDONE by the greater HARMFUL EFFECTS of the budget deficits he was projecting to run, and the INCREASED INTEREST EXPENSES of servicing the surging national debt.)
All of which projections which seem to have been dead on the money... as our growth rate has settled well into sub-par territory, and the INTEREST PAYMENTS ALONE on the surging national debt are posed to now EXCEED the annual costs of the entire Iraq Occupation:
Interest payments on the debt have ballooned above $200 billion a year, making them one of the fastest growing parts of the budget and rivaling the Iraq war in their annual cost.
The final point that I made was that the 'budget projections' the Bush folks have come up with for the remaining out years remain dangerously rosy colored (assuming unrealistic growth numbers, not counting war costs, etc.), and the demographic deluge is almost upon us....
A very poor hand left for the next team to play.... |
