Ambrya wrote:
I notice that while you expend a great deal of effort rambling on and on about whether or not the numbers are legit, you fail to address the material point, which is that the fact that the vast majority of our debt is being held by Asian governments puts us in a dangerous and untenable position.
The subject of who holds the debt is a totally separate issue. You'll get seasoned economists who'll disagree over whether having someone hold your debt is a benefit to you or to them, so I think it's silly for us to debate that point.
My main point was to take issue with your statement that 1/3rd of our federal revenue was being spent on the interest of the debt.
That figure is *still* absurd at first glance. I would assume it was taken by calculating the total debt and then multiplying by some standard interest rate. That's great and all, but that's not how the math works. It's also not how our budget process works. There is no budget line item that feeds 600 billion dollars each year into paying off the national debt.
Quote:
By the way, since I don't have the time to go digging through the whole site you gave the URL to, but the $3.3 to $4.2 trillion figures seemed a little fishy, so I did a little digging of my own at the
Bureau of the Public Debt Homepage and here's what is sitting there right at the top of the page:
According to my math, that's over $8 trillion.
BTW. Debt held by public is various bonds held by non government hands. That's money we have to pay. That's the 4.2T I was linking (my numbers were from the last complete year, not up to the minute). You really can't count the intergovernment holdings part because while it's counted as "debt", it's debt owed to the government. When a government program has a surplus, it spends that money buying t-bills from the treasury (it invests it). So the treasury assumes that money as a "debt", but you really can't count that as part of the national debt, since it's not really money that we've borrowed. It's money our government has invested.
So yeah. My 4.2T is the more accurate measure of how much the government is "in the red" so to speak. I used the final numbers from 2004 because it's really irrelevant to talk about government spending numbers and debt when you don't have the complete figures for everything. You're in essense comparing the current debt to "nothing". By using a complete set of yearly figures, you can put those numbers in context.
Quote:
For that matter, so does the figure of only $1 trillion in four years. You might want to check out http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdhisto4.htm, which gives a historical breakdown of where the debt has stood each year. According to that, the debt went up TWO trillion dollars in four years, from $5.8 trillion in Sept 2001 to $7.9 in Sept 2005.
Again. You are counting both sets of numbers as "national debt". While that may be technically true from the treasury departments perspective (they're just counting the value of T-bills out there), only the "debt held by public" is *actual* debt. It's either extremely naive, or extremely misleading to count the intergoverment debt as some sort of negative economic effect.
Quote:
Maybe it's YOUR figures that need a little more scrutiny.
No. My figures are accurate and (more importantly) relevant. You made a statement about federal budgeting. You claimed that we *spent* 1/3rd of our federal revenue paying off the interest of the national debt.
Here is the historical congressional budget office figures for the last 32 years. All values are reported in adjusted dollars and as a percentage of GDP. I challenge you to find where 1/3rd of the federal revenue is being spent paying interest on the national debt.
Ultimately, you can show those other treasury figures all you want, but it's the budget that tells us how the government spent it's money last year. And I've looked pretty hard but can't find a line item in there that allocates 1/3rd or anywhere close to 1/3rd of our federal revenue on interest payments.
Your statement was blatantly false. That's all I was trying to point out. I'm not sure what kind of voodoo math you used to make it, but it's simply not true.