Who Borrowed the Money and Who is Owed Payment
July 31, 2011
Just one thought. Its funny that fiscal conservatives seem to think defaulting on the debt is a justifiable strategy/approach to this problem. For all the talk about responsibility and balanced budget amendments, they’re happy to nullify pre-existing contractual obligations for the sake of politics. And if you look at who has contributed the most, its their presidents and they’re spending programs. What a bunch of deadbeats. And if you look at who is most likely to be hurt by all this; its the public through cuts to pre-agreed social programs, losses on their retirement savings, and the stability of our private institutions. So how is all this austerity to the point of insolvency talk good for America?
9 Comments
leave one →
Thanks for displaying the chart.
IN the column on who owns the debt, you have Federal Reserve as one of the holders of the debt. I can’t seem to make out how much the Federal Reserve holds but I would have thought that the QE programs might have added to quite a bit to Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.
Hey Vinay,
You are right about this, the Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet through the purchase of government bonds. The logic of this is that it helps negate inflationary pressures from printing money for stimulus purposes (although its hard to really know how these types of forced monetary policies actually work). It appears that the debt held by the federal reserve is in the top bracket of the Government debt section ($1.6 trillion).
Very good analysis. I have also done some cursory entries on my blog at posteconomist.wordpress.com.
Your blog looks interesting. I’ll keep an eye on it.
This looks like it is designed to “blame Bush” for all this economic mess going on right now. In reality the federal deficit each year under Bush was between 1B and 2B dollars. Only in the last year did the federal deficeit ballon to 400B level, whereas Obama’s deficit is four time the WORST deficit Bush racked up.
I an sure the main stream media and MSNBC will run with this.
Correction:
should be “each year under Bush was between 100B and 200B dollars.”
Sorry
Uh hey Carl, I’m gonna call bullshit on this one. So sure, Bush’s tax cuts + wars + discretionary spending + medicare drug program were spread over his presidency. So what, only 20% of his total deficit contribution came from Stimulus + Tarp spending. The remaining 80% of spending (4.5 trillion of debt worth) was for his pet projects. Interesting that Republicans don’t think $4.5 trillion of debt is important, but Obama’s $1.4 trillion debt contribution is Stalinist (and this figure includes his stimulus spending).
Also, $4.5 trillion of spending over 8 years is $500 billion per year, hence your numbers are bullshit (and this assumes all his spending happened at the beginning of the term).
No wonder Republicans hate math. I’m sorry, but if anyone is to blame, it IS BUSH!
So answer this question Carl: why are Republicans acting like they care about debt, when they created it all oh so happily under the previous regime? Now they use it as an excuse to get what they want.
There is aq little trickery used in the Bush in grand scale and others in smaller case – carry expenses off budget such as Medicare Drug plan and Iraq War. This way you can make speeches about decreasing budget gaps but the debt numbers keep going up.
That may be where Carl is getting his figures.