Unexpectedly Intriguing!
14 December 2010

It's time to update our U.S. national debt history visualization project, bringing it fully up to date through Fiscal Year 2010. First up, the exponential view of both annual GDP and the national debt:

U.S. Annual GDP and National Debt 1791-2010

And now, the same data, but shown on a log-lin chart:

U.S. Annual GDP and National Debt 1791-2010, Logarithmic Scale

Here is another log-lin chart, but this time, showing GDP and the national debt per capita:

U.S. Annual GDP and National Debt per Capita 1791-2010, Logarithmic Scale

Finally, let's conclude with the U.S. national debt burden, or rather, the debt-to-income ratio for the nation:

U.S. National Debt Burden, 1791-2010

Data Sources

Notes

The national debt data used in the charts above is for the United States' total public debt outstanding, which includes the so-called intragovernmental holdings category, which mostly represents where surplus Social Security tax collections have gone since the early 1980s.

Since this category of the national debt must be repaid through tax collections or from the proceeds from the issuance of new debt held directly by the public whenever Social Security runs in the red, as it has begun to do in recent quarters and is projected to do consistently after 2017, we recognize no meaningful difference between the intragovernmental holdings portion of the national debt and the regular debt held by the public.

Labels: , ,

About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

ironman at politicalcalculations

Thanks in advance!

Recent Posts

Indices, Futures, and Bonds

Closing values for previous trading day.

Most Popular Posts
Quick Index

Site Data

This site is primarily powered by:

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

CSS Validation

Valid CSS!

RSS Site Feed

AddThis Feed Button

JavaScript

The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.

Other Cool Resources

Blog Roll

Market Links

Useful Election Data
Charities We Support
Shopping Guides
Recommended Reading
Recently Shopped

Seeking Alpha Certified

Archives