I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

he used a lot of words, he must be right.

I'm not ignoring it. It's a bogus figure for this purpose. Anyone who uses it to make a point about how much debt we have relative to some other point in time is either deliberately using the wrong data to fudge the numbers, or doesn't know which numbers are the correct ones.





You honestly don't know the difference? Ignorance is bliss I guess. I honestly can't blame you though, since there are a hell of a lot of sources out there that also misuse the "national debt" figure. You're just repeating what you've heard without knowing it's wrong.


In the US, national debt is a tally of the dollar amount of all outstanding treasury bills. There are two methods by which t-bills become outstanding:

1. Public debt. This is when the treasury borrows money from the public (and has to pay it back). Typically, this is because of a budget deficit in a given year. The government collects less money in revenue than it spends, so it must borrow the difference. The treasury sells t-bills to the public (which can be anyone), with a promise to pay those bills back with interest. This is "real debt" in that the government must pay back the bills at some point.


2. Intergovernmental debt. This is when the government borrows from itself. When a government program is funded via act of congress (like in a budget that was voted on), it *must* allocate the amount of money that was mandated to that program. It's illegal not to. However, quite often the program doesn't actually require as much money as is budgeted. It has a budget surplus (in that one program). When this happens, the treasury takes the extra money from that program and hands it t-bills of equal value (because it would be illegal to just take the money). Then the money can be reallocated to other programs that are underfunded.


The reason why that second type of debt doesn't count is because it's not real debt. The government doesn't actually owe anyone any money. It thought it needed say $500M to fund some program this year, but the program only needed $400M. The extra $100M is reallocated elsewhere and is spent, but the $100M worth of t-bills the program has doesn't need to be paid back because the program will be budgeted an additional amount next year. It doesn't need that money because it didn't spend it during that year. But since the money was budgeted to that program by act of congress, only an act of congress can deallocated it. And congress does just this. Periodically, it goes through the books and looks for the billions of dollars (trillions actually) of t-bills in this state and then administratively zeros them out. Violla! Debt gone and no one misses it because the programs are funded yearly, so past year surpluses aren't going to be needed or missed.


Intergovernmental debt is a purely administrative thing. It's not real debt. You should *never* include it in a debt calculation, doubly so if you're comparing debt levels in different years. This is because depending on how recently congress has done of of those housekeeping bills to clean up those t-bills, the "national debt" can be several Trillion dollars higher or lower.


Since public debt is an aggregate tally of deficits over time, it includes all of the money the country has actually had to borrow to pay for all the things it does. It's the only figure you should use (or need to use) to determine whether the country is borrowing too much money or "going more in debt". Anyone using the total national debt figure is misleading you (or ignorant of what that figure really means). Any honest assessment of relative debt will use public debt. And if they're really being honest, they'll measure public debt against GDP (with some concession given to times when GDP may drop of course).


Not quite a novel, but hopefully, it clarifies the issue. Don't use national debt. Use public debt. What's interesting is that the site you linked clearly does know the difference, but chooses to use total national debt instead. Which is dishonest.

Not entirely true. Most intergovernmental debt doesn't come from just taking a few bucks from the manhole cover fund and moving them to the Pentagon lightbulb fund, they came from raiding Social Security, federal pension and Medicare trust funds. Either those T-Bills need to actually be paid back (i.e. they're real debt) or else Congress is purposefully destroying the solvency of those programs.

T-Bills owed to the Social Security Trust Fund alone was $2.4 trillion in 2010. I'm not saying a distinction shouldn't be made between intergovernmental and public debt but it certainly doesn't deserve the handwaving you're giving it.

With the T-Bills owed to Social Security, that was money paid to the US by its own people in trust that it would be re-disbursed back to them at a later date. It's not so much intergovernmental debt as it is debt that the US owes is own citizens.

I doubt it. He's still alive after all.

Yup. But it's still not the same as a debt owed to someone who paid for X amount of t-bills and now wants his money back with interest. We can legislatively change how we structure social security payments over time (and do already for reasons unrelated to this btw). We can't pass a law and decide we're not going to pay someone the face value on a t-bill. Well, we can, but that's called defaulting on our debt.

I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion based on my previous posts. It looks more to me like you don't understand how debt is calculated and measured.



Yes, but it's important to know who is owed. Intergovernmental debt is like raiding your kids college fund to pay for the electricity bill this month. A bill collector isn't going to show up demanding that you pay, or they shut of your power. What it means is that (in this example), you will have less money to pay for your kids college some number of years down the line. It's still the same total revenue coming in and the same spending going out that matters in terms of "real debt". The fact that your promised to send your kid to Harvard and had to settle on the local state university is a whole different animal to having your home foreclosed upon because you can't pay the mortgage.




Repeating this kind of statement doesn't really help your argument. Yes. Debt is high right now. But debt was higher back then, and we got out of it, not by raising taxes and increasing spending, but by lowering taxes and decreasing spending. So perhaps we ought to consider doing something similar today?



I'm again confused how one represents proof of the other. What we do about it is a different question than whether the debt is "high" or not. And you're wrong. They didn't raise taxes. They lowered them. I agree with the spending bit too of course. Now if only we could get the Democrats to agree to decrease spending, we'd be in good shape.



How the hell does massive spending help slow down the rate of debt increase? I'm starting to suspect you're just randomly mashing on the keyboard at this point. Spending is what causes debt. You spend more than you take in. Revenue drops when the economy goes into a downturn. That's normal and natural. You can expect higher deficits during those downturns and some increase in debt. But when you combine that with massive spending increases, you get massive increase in debt, like we've seen in the past few years.


Debt is an accumulation of deficits. Deficits are a yearly calculation of the difference between spending and revenue. Spending is a direct effect on deficit (and therefore on debt). However, tax rates have only a somewhat direct effect on revenue, and they are not the only effect. As I believe I stated earlier, if we were sitting at 4-5% unemployment and were not collecting enough revenue, then we might consider that taxes were too low (assuming spending isn't abnormally high of course). But we're at 9% unemployment (and more who are off the list). Because of that, the revenue problem isn't about tax rates, but about employment rates. Our objective should be to create jobs.

The problem is that there are two competing theories about how to do this. The left believes that the government should spend money employing people, and the right believes that the government should lower taxes (or in this case just promise not to raise taxes) and loosen regulations which may affect hiring in order to encourage private markets to employ people. Obviously, I believe in the second option, but regardless of which side you stand on, that is the question facing us right now. Simply repeating that "we're in debt, so we must do X" isn't really productive IMO.

Inaccurately and dishonestly, yes. We've covered that.

Really? You didn't understand that those benefits aren't some gift or token of heart-felt gratitude but rather part of their salary agreement and wages? And that you're very much so taking from them and not paying them back when you accept their work and fail to uphold your end of the salary agreement?

Well, if that's the difference between conservatives and liberals, thank God I'm liberal.

We are 23 pages into a thread that mostly is about alma thinking that gays are icky, and shouldn't be in the military. What is your point?

I bet it really stings that your state is treating them so nicely. If only any of you had balls to actually do anything other than fluffing their pillows and helping them build tents they would be having trouble in Tennessee, too.

Yes, I'm already well aware you lie to people's faces and talk behind their backs because you have no balls and are afraid of what other people think of you.

When they're not busy calling them lying whores, anyway