Updated July 2014
I thought that it was time to examine the debt incurred by the United States federal government over the past five decades once again, particularly in light of the fact that we have been subjected to a series of debt ceiling negotiations, and in noting that the $17.59 trillion debt has is now sitting at just over 103 percent of GDP as shown on this graph:
I thought that it was time to examine the debt incurred by the United States federal government over the past five decades once again, particularly in light of the fact that we have been subjected to a series of debt ceiling negotiations, and in noting that the $17.59 trillion debt has is now sitting at just over 103 percent of GDP as shown on this graph:
I looked back over the past 52 years
at the debt issues that faced the last 10 administrations. For my source
material, I took data from the
Treasury Direct website and used their very handy monthly
search function to examine the debt history for the years and months in
question. To ensure that you understand how I used the numbers, I have
taken the debt figures for the end of the month of January or, in the case of
Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, the end of the month of their last month
of service.
Here's the chart showing the
Presidents in chronological order with the debt (all debt figures in billions
of dollars) at the beginning of each President's term, the debt at the end of
the term, the amount in nominal dollars by which the debt grew, the total
percentage that debt grew over the President's full term and the length of the
President's term (in years and months expressed as a decimal):
It is interesting to see that the
current Administration has accumulated more debt that all of the previous
Administrations save George W. Bush.
You’ll notice that, once again, I have used a somewhat less familiar accounting term,
the compound annual
growth rate as shown in this formula:
Now, let’s use the compound annual
growth rate and put the Presidents in order from least to greatest CAGR:
As it stands now, the Obama
Administration has, by a relatively wide margin, the highest nominal debt
increase, with the debt rising by $6.956 trillion in five years and six months.
This compares to “only” $4.916 trillion for the Bush II administration over an eight-year
period. As I’ve noted before, first place overall for the highest
percentage and compound annual growth rate for the debt goes to President
Reagan who, in his two terms saw the debt rise by a whopping 189 percent or an
annual compounded growth rate of 14.18 percent, levels which have not even been
approached by more recent Administrations.
Now, let's put all of this into
perspective in two ways. With an estimated 316,700,000 Americans of all ages,
the per capita debt share for each man, woman and child is:
$55,538
In the last year of President
Obama's first term, the median household income in the United States was
$51,017 according to the Census Bureau.
Fortunately for all Americans, the Treasury Department has set up a means by which everyday citizens can make donations that will go directly to pay down the debt. Here is a chart showing how much has been donated on an annual basis since 1996:
Assuming that starting today, there was no additional federal debt accumulated and that on average, taxpayers voluntarily donated $2 million a year to pay down the debt, it would take only 8,629,500 years to pay off what is currently owed by Washington!
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Between Bush and Obama they have increased the national debt by 13 trillion dollars in 13 years. Then there is another 100 trillion dollars in off the books debt. They are intentionally creating a financial crisis. The CBO said, this week, that we are getting close to a financial crisis now.
ReplyDeleteOnce we have a financial crisis Obama has the right to declare a national emergency by using executive order #11051.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.
-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency (FEMA) to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.
If they would have just given each of the 316,700,000 Americans an equal peice of the 13 trillion we would have each received a check of about 41,000 dollars.
DeleteMy brother suggested I might like this website. He
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Thank you, I've recently been looking for info about this subject for a long time and yours is the
ReplyDeletebest I've discovered till now. But, what about the bottom line?
Are you certain about the supply?
An under-reported and unnoticed report was issued last week by the Office of Management and Budget which is required to from time to time review and update the U.S. federal budget. The report titled the “Mid-Session Review” paints a far bleaker forecast of the deficit going forward than originally predicted.
ReplyDeleteJames Grant and Jim Chanos recently participated in a talk at the New York Historical Society, both men make it perfectly clear they see what is being cast upon us is a giant fraud. We should be dubious of those making promises this will end well. The article below delves into the bleak deficit numbers now being predicted.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2018/07/national-debt-exploding-is-fraud-cast.html