MyGovCost News & Blog

David Gray says:

I would like to see this chart adjusted for inflation AND adjusted for population; i.e., on a per capita basis.

Trisha says:

What I want to know–and most everyone I know wants to know–is to whom do we owe this gargantuan debt. Who is holding the mortgage and is eventually going to foreclose on us? How much is each financier holding and what has been put up as guarantee of re-payment? Have the “powers that be” in our government put up our land as collateral and like Greece we will start turning our land over to our creditors? What’s going to happen if we can’t turn things around?

Mike Bishop says:

It’s interesting that the largest spikes in our national debt occurred during the administrations of Ronald Reagan (R) in the early 80′s and George W. Bush (R) in the early 2000′s.

Republicans frequently paint Democrats as the “tax and spend” party, but they appear to be the “cut taxes and spend anyway” party. Too bad their partisan sheep don’t recognize this simple truth.

Isamar says:

From the description above: Like all government spending, the Treasury would credit the reserve accounts held by the commercial bank at the central bank. The commercial bank in question would be where the target of the spending had an account. So the commercial bank’s assets rise and its liabilities also increase because a deposit would be made.” But the commercial banks net position would be zero in this case because the current and future value of its assets and liabilities would always be equal. What you failed to include is that no commercial bank would participate in this arrangement because it would be nonprofitable. In the case of bond issuance, as long as the yield curve is sloped positively, a commercial bank can borrow short from the fed’s discount window (or from non-interest bearing deposits) to buy longer dated debt and pocket the difference. The U. S. Treasury does not issue debt for the explicit reason of maintaining an interest rate target. If they did then they would never need to issue marketable debt and there would be no reason for federal reserve open market operations. The U. S. Treasury sells debt to finance the budget deficit. The federal reserve does not require marketable government debt to hit an interest rate target. They could just as easily announce what the discount window rate is going to be without any buying or selling of liabilities (government or otherwise). Also, on inflation:“ Funding deficits with debt issuing is less inflationary in the future: The mainstream believes this on the basis of a plethora of elaborate and purely theoretical models that bluntly contradict the actual historical record, and range from the ridiculous to the truly bizzare.” From the equation of exchange: Debt * Velocity = Real GDP * (1 + Inflation Rate) Productivity = Real GDP / Debt. If we let productivity and velocity be our exogenous variables Inflation Rate = Velocity / Productivity – And so inflation is caused by productivity not growing as fast as money velocity. Why might that happen? Because a government or an individual enterprise (or both) may decide that non-productive ventures (like wars and commodity speculation both financed with debt) are “ good ideas”.