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Following up on claims about debt
May. 16th, 2012 08:37 amCommenting on a comment from a while back:
...socialism and ever-increasing debt go hand-in-hand, and are not sustainable.
O rly? Anyone who beleives this maybe ought to check a list of countries sorted by debt as a percentage of GDP before making that claim. Greece and Italy, as we know, are total basket cases and are dragging the rest of Europe down in a bad way. But as individual countries, you will see that Canada, the EU as a whole, most of the individual EU nations, and a smattering of lefty countries such as New Zealand all enjoy a smaller debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States.
This particular comparison is complicated by the large, recent increase of the US budget deficit, the greater part of which is attributable to the Bush tax cuts and other factors originating in the Bush administration:
[I was a bit shocked by this chart at first but have seen no serious challenges to this claim; Bush really was a disaster, and we're going to be paying for his bad decisions for a long, long time.]
Ignoring the endlessly slippery definition of "socialism", which changes depending on whatever point someone's trying to prove, the debt-to-gdp chart shows that left-leaning economic policy has, on the whole, either no relation or a modestly negative relation to government debt. Debt is more about the fiscal irresponsibility of governments, regardless of ideology.
My wild-ass guess about what is really behind the differences in national debt? I'm tempted to attribute it to "excitability". If you've traveled around Europe you know that Greeks and Italians tend to be easily spun up, while Swedes, Germans, and the French tend to be more sanguine and critical of what they hear, and not so reactionary. New Zealanders are positively stoic. The Japanese, to be sure, are a huge exception but don't completely overturn this relationship. Americans strike me as particularly excitable across the political spectrum, and IMHO this is generally associated with short-term economic thinking that carries negative long-term consequences.
(*Update - the chart here seems to show some confusion between public debt and gross debt when compared to the linked table, which gives different numbers; there are many different measures of debt. However, as far as I can tell the definition used is consistent within each source and still supports the claims I make here.)
...socialism and ever-increasing debt go hand-in-hand, and are not sustainable.
O rly? Anyone who beleives this maybe ought to check a list of countries sorted by debt as a percentage of GDP before making that claim. Greece and Italy, as we know, are total basket cases and are dragging the rest of Europe down in a bad way. But as individual countries, you will see that Canada, the EU as a whole, most of the individual EU nations, and a smattering of lefty countries such as New Zealand all enjoy a smaller debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States.
This particular comparison is complicated by the large, recent increase of the US budget deficit, the greater part of which is attributable to the Bush tax cuts and other factors originating in the Bush administration:
[I was a bit shocked by this chart at first but have seen no serious challenges to this claim; Bush really was a disaster, and we're going to be paying for his bad decisions for a long, long time.]
Ignoring the endlessly slippery definition of "socialism", which changes depending on whatever point someone's trying to prove, the debt-to-gdp chart shows that left-leaning economic policy has, on the whole, either no relation or a modestly negative relation to government debt. Debt is more about the fiscal irresponsibility of governments, regardless of ideology.
My wild-ass guess about what is really behind the differences in national debt? I'm tempted to attribute it to "excitability". If you've traveled around Europe you know that Greeks and Italians tend to be easily spun up, while Swedes, Germans, and the French tend to be more sanguine and critical of what they hear, and not so reactionary. New Zealanders are positively stoic. The Japanese, to be sure, are a huge exception but don't completely overturn this relationship. Americans strike me as particularly excitable across the political spectrum, and IMHO this is generally associated with short-term economic thinking that carries negative long-term consequences.
(*Update - the chart here seems to show some confusion between public debt and gross debt when compared to the linked table, which gives different numbers; there are many different measures of debt. However, as far as I can tell the definition used is consistent within each source and still supports the claims I make here.)
