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Infographic - US National Debt

whitehouse.gov

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Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#21

Post by jacobolus »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #17
karmalizer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to tell what exactly I'm supposed to learn from the graph. Normally, graphs like this would include a time axis, but this one does not. This makes it non-obvious that the Obama debt is over a shorter period than the Bush debt. If you normalize for time in office and discount the military spending (arguing that any president would have done similar after 9/11), then both administration's debts seem very equa…

This is probably the graph you want: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1gU Here is the rate of change. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1gV Normalizing for time (though not the military), both administration's debts do not seem equal at all.

The point of the whitehouse.gov graphic is to split the debt by policies rather than by time, though. For example, lost tax revenue and some increases in spending are directly tied to the economic recession, and would have been the same whoever was in office (this is what the graphic labels “technical changes”), and policies like the so-called “Bush Tax Cuts”, the prescription drug benefit, and the price of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to cost large amounts of tax revenue even after the change of administration.

It’s quite reasonable, I think, for the Obama administration to refuse to be held responsible for such parts of the deficit largely out of their control.

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#22

Post by scrrr »

davidw wrote: post #19

Off topic: most articles about politics.

Agreed. I don't think it belongs here. But I think people like the subject to politics because the barrier of participation in discussions is low. It's harder when talking specifics of a programming language for example. Maybe that is one of the reasons why something like this gets upvoted.

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#24

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #15
karmalizer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no time axis as this isn't particularly a time-based graph The graph pretends to be a time-based graph, though, by highlighting the differences between the Bush and Obama administrations. It's not like it would take any more work or space to lay the information out horizontally. I'm sure I've seen it done before, but this is the closest I can find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent.…

You can also get it at Wolfram|Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+national+deficit (scale for last 10 years). I note that the deficit peaked in 2010, so it's starting to come down.

[deleted]

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#25

Post by wisty »

anonymoushn wrote: post #14
dimmuborgir wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Obama took office in the middle of a recession and had to immediately release a massive stimulus package (recovery act).

I would not say that he had to do that, or that it was a particularly good idea.

OK, it might have been an objectively bad response (economists will probably argue for decades on this, and still not agree), but it's still a pretty good excuse. Just like 9/11 can be used to excuse Bush's military spending (or at least, some of it).

Both are black swan events. The real damage is done by things like tax cuts, structural spending increases, and social security, as they are much more structural.

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#27

Post by nhebb »

Infographics are for people who don't know what numbers mean. :-) If you want data, go to the Historical Tables page of the Office of Management and Budget [1] and download Table 1.3 [2] for receipts and outlays in constant (2005) dollars.

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

[2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#28

Post by cmelbye »

knowtheory wrote: post #20
tomjen3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Stuff like this shouldn't be on the front-page unless it comes from an impartial source.

And would you like to define what an impartial source is? I'd rather deal with analyses on their merits, rather than based on arbitrarily decided notions of impartiality. This isn't baseball. There may nominally be two sides to the debt ceiling debacle, but it's not a game. Let's look at what is being said, rather than disqualifying based on who's said it.

I would define an impartial source as a group not affiliated with the political parties that are being compared in the infographic, not too complicated...

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#29

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Can we just stipulate that graphics from whitehouse.gov are just going to exist to serve a political purpose, no matter who is president? Isn't this better than getting into pint less and endless political debates? Flagged.

BTW, there are a lot of great graphs about this subject out there -- and they're useful, too. Aside from the political spin, I can hardly decipher this graph, much less use it to explore the targeted subject.

The underlying logical and political problem here is that the things being compared are not related to each other. That is, the entire purpose of having elections and having both a legislature to create a yearly budget and an executive to enact it is to control and adjust the application of previous policies. To argue otherwise would be to assert either the system itself is broken beyond repair, and/or the current people elected are incompetent -- neither of which I can see the Whitehouse doing.

Re: Infographic - US National Debt

#30

Post by anonymoushn »

wisty wrote: post #25
anonymoushn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not say that he had to do that, or that it was a particularly good idea.

OK, it might have been an objectively bad response (economists will probably argue for decades on this, and still not agree), but it's still a pretty good excuse. Just like 9/11 can be used to excuse Bush's military spending (or at least, some of it). Both are black swan events. The real damage is done by things like tax cuts, structural spending increases, and social security, as they are much more structural.

Oh, certainly. I remain confused as to why we would cut payroll tax by 2% while running deficits of 10% of GDP, or extend any portion of Bush's tax cuts, or refuse to discuss cuts to entitlement programs when our tax revenue is not enough to pay for entitlement programs, payments on the national debt, and the IRS.
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