Thursday, July 01, 2010

Say what, eh?

Evidently the CBO has released a report saying that the national debt will reach 62% of GDP this year. OK, let's check this out:

National debt: 13 trillion dollars

GDP: about 14.6 trillion dollars, according to government statistics. (not billion, correction courtesy Pentamom)

Now I don't know what kind of math the CBO is using here, but with the arithmetic I learned, that's not 62%, but rather close to 90%. So what's going on, eh?

My assumption here is that the parameters given to the CBO ignore the portion of the national debt held by the government, which is a patently dishonest way of calculating the load--unless we've got plans in motion to repudiate the portion of the national debt held by government--e.g. the Social Security trust fund.

It's an object lesson; the "nonpartisan" CBO only calculates number using the methods prescribed for it by a clearly partisan Congress and a clearly partisan White House. Pelosi in, Reid out, eh.

1 comment:

pentamom said...

Your GDP number should be trillions, right?