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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (643687)	1/27/2012 8:29:09 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578594

Therefore, I think the "third biggest" is in comparison to what the deficits were back in WWII. As a portion of GDP, the biggest deficits in American history were WWII deficits. Then WWI. Current deficits are either third, or fourth after the Civil War deficits. After those you get Reagan's deficits, but they are far lower then the current deficits. After Reagan you have what I think I remember is a slight drop to the Depression deficits. I posted the data somewhere on SI but I can't find it now. I believe it didn't include the Revolutionary War era so I can't compare or rank those deficits. A related post, but dealing with debt not deficits (that I found when looking for the post about deficits) --- Federal debt data going back to 1790 - Usually I only see since WWII, sometimes WWI, so its nice to have more complete data. In this case with projections forward by the CBO. cboblog.cbo.gov H/T FUBHO Interesting that until FDR we had several serious peaks (Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, early Great Depression) that where all about the same. Those situations where serious, so you could argue that WWII shouldn't have been noticeably bigger (as a percentage of the economy), but I'm ok with such horrible deficits considering they are temporary war spending, for a very major war, and they helped end the war sooner, but after that, we never return to the old peak levels. The post WWII low is about the same as the pre-depression high. Still the debt has been at manageable (if too high for my taste) levels, but now that's changing too. The "extended baseline scenario" has much higher debt than any since the pay down of the WWII debt got underway in earnest. The "alternate fiscal scenario" essentially amounts to total fiscal collapse. Message 26730081 Edit - Found the deficit post -- CHART OF THE DAY: The US Deficit Problem Is At CIVIL WAR Levels businessinsider.com Message 27506229