karen carpenter eats

September 29th, 2011 at 3:47PM

danforth:

Ugh. More facts. Tricky things, facts.
What I’m saying is the Republican ethos is a fraud, badly maintained by lizard-brained, imagination-challenged cretins of infantile emotional intelligence who are on the wrong side of every social, environmental and human issue and then they plunge the country into debt. They get a great big goose egg on being fiscally conservative, a fundamental tenet of their worldview. What are you good for, GOP? What in Ford’s name are you good for?

While I appreciate the sentiment here, and it is one with which am I personally aligned, I’m surprised that so many of my friends have forwarded this on as a “fact” when so little is actually explained here. Facts aren’t tricky, but numbers are.
The chart above cites the “Treasury Department” as the source, and labels the axes, but it is obviously partisan. I pulled the historical budgets—which contain some forecasted numbers, go figure—from whitehouse.gov and did a little bit of number-crunching. The above seems to use merely the percent change (debt increase over the debt at the beginning of the period), and does not take into account the change as a percentage of the gross domestic product, which is a more accurate reflection of the “real” debt. This is the number that actual economists (bless them, those creatures of the night) use in official budgets.
Hence, using the numbers most representative of the debt results in a chart like this:

Pretty different from the original chart! And let’s not forget, the correlation of the debt increase (or decrease) during each presidency does not necessarily reflect causation, though I’ll leave that debate to others much more familiar with economics than I am—or better at political spin.
I just figured I’d take a shot at getting the numbers straight.

Ugh. More facts. Tricky things, facts.

What I’m saying is the Republican ethos is a fraud, badly maintained by lizard-brained, imagination-challenged cretins of infantile emotional intelligence who are on the wrong side of every social, environmental and human issue and then they plunge the country into debt. They get a great big goose egg on being fiscally conservative, a fundamental tenet of their worldview. What are you good for, GOP? What in Ford’s name are you good for?

While I appreciate the sentiment here, and it is one with which am I personally aligned, I’m surprised that so many of my friends have forwarded this on as a “fact” when so little is actually explained here. Facts aren’t tricky, but numbers are.

The chart above cites the “Treasury Department” as the source, and labels the axes, but it is obviously partisan. I pulled the historical budgets—which contain some forecasted numbers, go figure—from whitehouse.gov and did a little bit of number-crunching. The above seems to use merely the percent change (debt increase over the debt at the beginning of the period), and does not take into account the change as a percentage of the gross domestic product, which is a more accurate reflection of the “real” debt. This is the number that actual economists (bless them, those creatures of the night) use in official budgets.

Hence, using the numbers most representative of the debt results in a chart like this:

Pretty different from the original chart! And let’s not forget, the correlation of the debt increase (or decrease) during each presidency does not necessarily reflect causation, though I’ll leave that debate to others much more familiar with economics than I am—or better at political spin.

I just figured I’d take a shot at getting the numbers straight.