Infographic - US National Debt | Hacker News Reader

Infographic - US National Debt

whitehouse.gov

40 pointsarst82928 comments

It seems disingenuous to exclude partial responsibility for the occupations in Irag and Afghanistan from Obama policies given that we are still there.

Agreed. Stuff like this shouldn't be on the front-page unless it comes from an impartial source.

And would you like to define what an impartial source is?

I'd rather deal with analyses on their merits, rather than based on arbitrarily decided notions of impartiality. This isn't baseball. There may nominally be two sides to the debt ceiling debacle, but it's not a game. Let's look at what is being said, rather than disqualifying based on who's said it.

I would define an impartial source as a group not affiliated with the political parties that are being compared in the infographic, not too complicated...

I read that as attributing costs to policies, rather than administrations, but good point. Obama voted for TARP, so he should split that cost with Bush.

As a Canadian with a reasonable working knowledge of international news and economics who happens to be geeky about data visualization... this is a confusing jumble.

I'm not sure the average joe would put time into figuring out what this is supposed to be telling them.

Americans, do you think this is good and I'm just out to lunch? I'm happy to be wrong on this, I'm just looking for input.

Hey pete,

I will admit, even as someone who supports Obama, and finds the GOP misrepresentation of the debt ceiling debate (and history in general) completely unconscionable, the primary purpose for this graphic is a political one.

How can you tell? The primary foci are the red and blue blocks. I.E. who's responsible for what portion of the debt.

The rest of the graphic is extraneous detail.

There are a pile of more interesting graphics, some of which you can find here: http://www.businessinsider.com/republican-budget-hypocrisy-2... and http://flowingdata.com/2011/07/26/how-the-deficit-got-so-big...

Infographics are for people who don't know what numbers mean. :-) If you want data, go to the Historical Tables page of the Office of Management and Budget [1] and download Table 1.3 [2] for receipts and outlays in constant (2005) dollars.

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

[2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...

It is dishonest to call the Farm Bill a "Bush Policy" when it was passed over his veto, and then-Senator Obama voted for it!

Off topic: most articles about politics.

Agreed. I don't think it belongs here. But I think people like the subject to politics because the barrier of participation in discussions is low. It's harder when talking specifics of a programming language for example. Maybe that is one of the reasons why something like this gets upvoted.

I don't know... you could look it as a data visualization post (and not a very good one, even for the point they are trying to make).

Wow, the numbers actually seem pretty conservative to me. This put Bush's stimulus at 200B. The Washington Post and NYT put it much higher (773b) [1].

I'm curious how the public will receive this.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/obamas-a...

Can we just stipulate that graphics from whitehouse.gov are just going to exist to serve a political purpose, no matter who is president? Isn't this better than getting into pint less and endless political debates? Flagged.

BTW, there are a lot of great graphs about this subject out there -- and they're useful, too. Aside from the political spin, I can hardly decipher this graph, much less use it to explore the targeted subject.

The underlying logical and political problem here is that the things being compared are not related to each other. That is, the entire purpose of having elections and having both a legislature to create a yearly budget and an executive to enact it is to control and adjust the application of previous policies. To argue otherwise would be to assert either the system itself is broken beyond repair, and/or the current people elected are incompetent -- neither of which I can see the Whitehouse doing.

Now this is a contextually appropriate informational graphic.

Something tells me the White House are making good use of Professor Tufte.

It's hard to tell what exactly I'm supposed to learn from the graph. Normally, graphs like this would include a time axis, but this one does not. This makes it non-obvious that the Obama debt is over a shorter period than the Bush debt. If you normalize for time in office and discount the military spending (arguing that any president would have done similar after 9/11), then both administration's debts seem very equal.

Is there any benefit to dropping the time axis without providing an alternative?

This is probably the graph you want:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1gU

Here is the rate of change.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1gV

Normalizing for time (though not the military), both administration's debts do not seem equal at all.

The point of the whitehouse.gov graphic is to split the debt by policies rather than by time, though. For example, lost tax revenue and some increases in spending are directly tied to the economic recession, and would have been the same whoever was in office (this is what the graphic labels “technical changes”), and policies like the so-called “Bush Tax Cuts”, the prescription drug benefit, and the price of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to cost large amounts of tax revenue even after the change of administration.

It’s quite reasonable, I think, for the Obama administration to refuse to be held responsible for such parts of the deficit largely out of their control.

> discount the military spending (arguing that any president would have done similar after 9/11)

I'm pretty sure a very large part of the military spending was because of the war in Iraq, which had nothing at all to do with 9/11.

I totally agree with you, but that doesn't change my point about the time axis.

To be fair, Obama took office in the middle of a recession and had to immediately release a massive stimulus package (recovery act).

I would not say that he had to do that, or that it was a particularly good idea.

OK, it might have been an objectively bad response (economists will probably argue for decades on this, and still not agree), but it's still a pretty good excuse. Just like 9/11 can be used to excuse Bush's military spending (or at least, some of it).

Both are black swan events. The real damage is done by things like tax cuts, structural spending increases, and social security, as they are much more structural.

Oh, certainly. I remain confused as to why we would cut payroll tax by 2% while running deficits of 10% of GDP, or extend any portion of Bush's tax cuts, or refuse to discuss cuts to entitlement programs when our tax revenue is not enough to pay for entitlement programs, payments on the national debt, and the IRS.

There's a ton of verbiage about X dollars of this and Y program of that which have contributed to the debt and deficit. Most of it doesn't serve to enlighten, I'm convinced that it's largely meant to confuse.

The Obama administration have just presented a very clear picture of what the components of the debt are.

Obama policies have been directed at contingencies and emergencies, not wars of choice and vast pay-offs to political benefactors. I'll grant Bush TARP.

On a per-year basis (giving Obama 1.5 years and Bush 8), the per year deficit is worse under Obama's policies, but the discretionary element is less. Bush got us into this mess, Obama's trying like hell to get us out (and last time I checked, the other team wasn't exactly cooperating enthusiastically).

We've also got the structural and internal (SSI) components of debt clearly spelled out.

Again: this is far better than I've seen from many other sources.

There's no time axis as this isn't particularly a time-based graph, it's a statement of current accounts, and an accounting of where those components came from.

There's no time axis as this isn't particularly a time-based graph

The graph pretends to be a time-based graph, though, by highlighting the differences between the Bush and Obama administrations. It's not like it would take any more work or space to lay the information out horizontally. I'm sure I've seen it done before, but this is the closest I can find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent...

You can also get it at Wolfram|Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+national+deficit (scale for last 10 years).

I note that the deficit peaked in 2010, so it's starting to come down.

It was my impression that the person called Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces had the power to give orders to the United States Armed Forces. Unless I am mistaken, any US war that is not occurring within the borders of the US is a war of choice on the part of that person.

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