#1) How is "federal debt held by the PUBLIC" reckoned?
It excludes "trust fund" money, or any kind of debt where the government itself is both the debt owner. I don't think it excludes anything else.
#2) Regarding your comment that "The claim that the debt is "almost doubling" under this President is absurd."
Not my comment. Its the comment from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND).
I wouldn't say "absurd" myself, although "misleading" would certainly be correct, and "inaccurate" is reasonable from a certain perspective.
Nominal dollar debt figures mean very little. At the least the calculation should use real dollars, but for most purposes percent of GDP is much better.
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....
But some periods of time have more expensive bad news than other periods. The extreme case of this was WWII (when federal spending and deficits went through the roof and rightly so). The problems during Bush's time in office (Iraq, WOT/Afghanistan, Katrina, the aftermath of the tech stock bubble being popped, and of course Iraq, although I know you'll say we shouldn't have done Iraq), aren't anywhere near WWII, but they provide a similar, if much smaller, explanation for increase in deficits. They go beyond what you would have in a typical presidential term. Clinton OTOH had unusually good luck in these terms, because he could benefit from the "peace dividend".
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
I disagree with that assertion. |
