Like most of you here, I have been appalled at the pig-at-the-trough spending of the last several Congresses and at least two political administrations. But I read a statement on Paul Krugman's blog (Krugman being the Nobel prize-winning economist that is also a columnist for the
New York Times). In his latest public blog entry, he makes the following points regarding the skyrocketing U.S. national debt...
The U.S. economy is enormous; this year our GDP will be around $14 trillion. If economic growth averages 2.5% a year and inflation is 2% a year, GDP will be around $22 trillion a decade from now. On that basis our national debt will equal around 45% of GDP.
Right now, federal debt is about 50% of GDP. So even if we do run the kind of deficits being projected, federal debt as a percentage of GDP will be less than it is now and substantially less than it was at the end of World War II.
Take a look at this blog entry as well as many others on Krugman's blog page at
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/