Interesting graphs and charts department

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by Griff

Boston Globe's debt chart.

The right hand column there is particularly interesting. Most of the debt is owed within the US, so if you try to "quantitatively ease" your way out of it (i.e. print money and devalue currency) you're mostly screwing yourselves.

I'm not so sure about the left column. I have doubts about pinning the debt to each president. Firstly, as various voices shout loudly from time to time, the prez is not totally in control of spending. As well as congress, there are the commitments from previous eras. For example, Obama couldn't just drop the Iraq thing on Jan 20th, 2009, he had to keep it going. I'd rather see what all the money has been spent on (social security, health care, defense etc) over the decades.

And putting tax cuts in as an expense raises all sorts of philosophical problems. I mean, suppose there had never been those tax cuts, but there was still a smaller debt. Could we say that the debt was because no-one has thought to increase taxes by a trillion dollars?