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Comment by karmalizer | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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