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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs

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To: RMF who wrote (42600)	4/6/2010 11:13:16 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 71588

No "triple" is almost completely meaningless as a measure. In fact its worse than meaningless. It distorts the perspective, making understanding less accurate. "Meaningless", at least wouldn't be causing any harm to our understanding.. It makes adding debt from a smaller base seem horrible, and adding debt to a larger base to seem to be no big deal, and thus presents the situation as the reverse of reality. The smaller the previous debt, the larger the multiplier would be, but the smaller the previous debt, the less problematic the multiplier would be. Lets say "President X" adds a trillion dollars of debt during his term. If the previous debt was also a trillion dollars, than he's doubled it. If it was 10 trillion he's only added 10 percent. If it was a billion, he's multiplied it by 1000 times. That measure would make it seem worse if the debt was only a billion ("President X" multipled the debt by 1000 times!"). But the debt increase was most problematic when it was increased by only 10%, adding an extra trillion to ten trillion is much less of a problem than adding an extra trillion to a billion.

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