Re: For Trucker


rickleeland wrote:
> > Your claims above, about the US reducing the war debt every year until
> > Reagan, only partially resemble the truth if you measure the debt as a
> > percentage of GDP. If we measure debt nominally, as you just did for
> > the last few decades, then your claims about the postwar period have
> > absolutely no truth to them at all. From 1962 until 1981 for example,
> > the federal debt more than tripled, nominally.
>
> > So if you measured debt as a percentage of GDP to arrive at your
> > less-than-truthful claims above, why did you suddenly switch to nominal
> > numbers for the Reagan and Bush years? Additionally, how did you
> > arrive at the $7 trillion number when federal government debt was at
> > $4.3 trillion last year? If we measure debt as a percentage of GDP, it
> > is now at 37.2%, whereas it was at 25.8% in 1981. Federal debt grew,
> > but not by the laughable factor of 600% you implied.
>
> Take a look at the following web sites:
>
> 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U .S._government_debt
>
> The national deficits of 1980 and 2004 are near the bottom of
> this page.

These are nominal debt numbers, and they include intergovernment debt.

-Nominally, the US did not reduce its debt the way you claimed after
WWII. You were comparing apples to oranges.
-Mr. Hummel was explicitly discussing publicly held debt, not
intergovernment debt.
-You linked our increase in debt to our trade imbalance. Only external
debt can be so linked, since intergovernment debt cannot be sold to our
trading partners.

> 2. Also under "Extra Links" near the bottom of the page, click "US
> Gross National Debt graph." (direct link: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html)
>
> I will take a second look at these data too.

I suggest that you measure government debt against economic growth.
The larger the economy, the less of a burden each dollor of debt is.
However if you must refer to it in nominal numbers, not even adjusted
for inflation, you really oughta use the same measures in all of your
discussion.

.

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