Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
{ Monthly Archives }
This has turned out to be a more complicated, and busier, week than I’d expected, and plain simple blogging has taken the back seat; I’ve instead spent my time on several things of a more financially rewarding nature.
In the mean time, at least, I expect to have a new essay up on PJM in a few hours. (As always, I’ll link it here, and move the copy here as well once PJM has their 48 hours.) And I’ll have a new Buddhism post up this weekend.
I’ve heard a lot of people quoting numbers like “the national debt is nearly $200,000 per person.” If you look on Google, for example, the first thing that comes up for ‘”national debt is” “per person”‘ is this page, which gives a figure of $161,287. There are also comparisons of GDP against the deficit, GDP against the debt, and so on. You know, I often find economics confusing and frustrating (why is it that Larry Kudlow and Paul Krugman can look at the same data and get nearly exactly contradictory interpretations?) but I can read a balance sheet and income statement, and this whole comparison struck me wrong. It would seem that national debt is a balance sheet figure while GDP is an income statement figure. I asked a well-known economist this, and he agreed with me that national debt should be compared for this sort of purpose with national wealth, leading to a kind of national net worth. (He asked not to be quoted, no doubt because he was embarrassed for me at such a prominent economist being asked such simple question.) this gave me the right keyword, though, and a moments googling led me to this chart…
… from Michael Mandel’s Economics Unbound blog. Suddenly things look a big different. Yes, we’ve got something like $162,000 in individual share of the national debt — but we’ve got something like $300,000 share of the national wealth. And it’s increasing; it was the highest in 2006 that it’s ever been. Notice some other things:
Now, this gets interesting. Put it into individual terms: for a family of four, this puts their share of the national wealth at around $1.2 million, and their share of the national debt at about $648 thousand — or, just to make the comparison more glaring, about $0.648 million.
Even potentially more interesting, look at where the inflection points happened: the national net worth started to decline as the recession start, in 2000, along with the .com bust. When does it start to go up again? At about the time the Bush tax cuts came into full effect (see here).
What else happened about that time? Why, the Iraqi campaign of the current war, of course. So, somehow with all the expenses of the war and all, national net worth is increasing, and has been since the war started.
Remember this the next time someone tells you how the Iraq War is sapping our national wealth.
(originally published in Pajamas Media 2008-02-21.)
More real content coming soon; in the mean time, I’ll have another piece in Pajamas Media, either today or tomorrow.
Update: click here to see it.
Another update: the comments have been fascinating (and why don’t I get comments here grumble grumble?), especially the ones that say “I don’t care what your silly arithmetic says, I reject your reality.” But it also leads to some further thoughts, which I guess i’ll write up here tonight.
In all cases, under all circumstances, anything said by an anonymous intelligence official will be exactly what is most politically convenient.
I’m writing this without the “help” of the WordPress visual editor. I’m finding the visual editor very frustrating: I do something creative with it (like right-aligning an attribution on a quote) and it will happily accept it, show the right thing on preview, and then rewrite my code so my creative thing goes away.
This paragraph, for example, ought to be right-aligned.
This is something [talk radio] supporters are likely to forget … when they have to come out of their bunkers and deal with the rest of us. They think we’re RINOs and DINOs, but we’re just Americans doing our normal thing and trying to figure things out.
