Tuesday, October 02, 2007

US Debt Approaches 10 Trillion Dollars

Our national debt is approaching 10 Trillion dollars. That's 30,000 dollars for every man woman and child in the united states. A nice chart showing the growth of the debt is here.
Half a trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly have not helped.
Here's a list of our foreign friends who finance 2.2 Trillion of our habit:
2007-10-03-WhoOwnsNationalDebt.png
Data from http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I know this number gets quoted a lot in scary magazine and news stories, but I do so detest statistics without proper context.

Here is that context:
The debt is currently at around 64% of our annual GDP (effectively our national gross income).

Now here comes the perspective. You have to think about this in terms of GDP. Owing $10M in debt is a very different thing for me and Warren Buffet.

How do you stack up against American Government in debt management? Do your total debt obligations divided by your annual gross income exceed 64%?

Unknown said...

I do like the chart! Thank You!

But dear JohnFx, it's actually not the size of the debt that counts. What matters who benefits from the interest payments.

I.e. who has the right / privilege to buy government paper in the first place?

More on http://publicdebts.wordpress.com