Political Debt

I started off at Tam's place this morning, like I often do, and following some links I ended up reading a couple of articles about How Hyperinflation Will Happen by Gonzalo Lira. I don't buy his conclusion (or, for that matter, some of his premises), that hyperinflation will hit the US within the next year or two, but his explanation of how it would happen is very interesting. It piqued my interest enough that I did a little more reading on the subject. There is no end to the amount of discussion on the economy, and eventually I got tired, but toward the end I came across a graph of the national debt, and I thought it was illuminating. There are good reasons for going into debt, like a war of conquest and expecting your victories to bring you wealth (the British Empire), or some massive construction project that will greatly improve your production capabilities (the Interstate Highway System). But lately we've been piling up trillions of dollars in debt because we are trying to kill a few thousand radical Muslims? I'm sorry, I don't think this is a cost-effective way to run a country.

The green line is revenue (taxes), the pink line is spending, and the dark red line is debt.
The horizontal lines are spaced one trillion dollars apart.
The range is from zero at the bottom to eleven trillion dollars at the top.
Click to embiggen.

I got the base graph for this from an article in USA Today. Their version is "interactive", meaning it will show you the actual dollar amounts for any point on the graph when you mouse over it. I added the Presidents and the colored bars for the parties: yellow for Republicans, aqua for Democrats. I wanted pastels so they wouldn't overpower the lines, and I wasn't up to mixing my own colors for this, so yellow and aqua will just have to do.

Note this graph goes all the back to WWII, which is what the little bump at the left side is all about. After that the debt slowly declined until the very end of Ford's term when it started up. Carter didn't seem to have much effect, one way or the other, but Reagan sure put us on the map. Things were going so well under Clinton that we were actually able to start reducing this huge debt. Then we got G.W. and his neo-cons and the sky became the limit. Things haven't slowed down under Obama, and I am sorry to see that.

If we don't get this debt thing under control, things are going to get much worse.

Update October 2016 replaced missing graph. However, linked larger version is gone and all the other links are dead.