Just to add, America had a bigger debt to GDP ratio than it did now after WW2. By the 1960s it had dropped from about a hundred and thirty five percent of GDP to about thirty yet America ran a deficit in every single year. THe reason this happened was America grew faster every year than the debt went up. You don't cut your way out of debt when you're a government, cutting spending is actually self defeating as your're subtracting from both sides of the ratio and moreso on the growth side when you cut spending.

If you grow at three percent a year and inflation runs at two percent then your GDP nominal number grows by five percent. That means you can run a five percent deficit and your ratio doesn't get any worse, they're both going up by five percent.

*(from the first post). If you fuckers understood these two posts then you know more about debt dynamics and sovereign debt than I guarantee you ninety five plus percent** of Americans/Canadians/Brits etc. And it isn't difficult at all. No heavy duty maths. No Greek letters. All you need to understand finance and economics to a degree sophisticated enough to a. be able to put in context and evaluate issues like this that are consequential and have some import and b. know more than ninety five plus percent of your fellow citizens is just common sense.

** I have a friend who works for an investment bank. His job is to take prospective and existing clients --people who have money that his bank is or would like to invest for them -- out to a ballgame or a meal or whatever and basically work out how dumb the money is, work out how much shit the bank can pull with them and still keep the customer. And I can tell you that ninety five percent of even the people at the top of the tree won't know what's in these two posts. The vast majority will believe things that "everybody knows", that governments are like households and have to tighten their belts when recessions happen and so on. They basically have a negative levelof knowledge. They believe a bunch of stuff that isn't true.