US debt visualized

http://www.wtfnoway.com/

by nuromancer • 15 years ago

240 87 15 years ago

wtfnoway.com

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

Here's another fun one: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-bil...

nuromancer2• 15 years ago

I would love to see a subsequent visualization illustrating where all this capital goes.

ck2• 15 years ago

Most of debt is from war because you don't have to have it funded to start one and once it's rolling well "gotta support the troops". Then the interest starts adding up fast.

Since the WTC demo is reduced to "half trillion floors", that means half of the first floor would be the entire lifetime cost of the NASA shuttle program.

Iraq War(s) would be the next five floors. Doesn't include Afghanistan or Libya or Yemen. Or our troop presence around the world like in Japan for some reason.

Next two floors would be the cost for heath care and benefits for injured/killed troops through 2050.

grepittech• 15 years ago

I would love for him to visualize how much we pay towards our debt each year in comparison to the actual debt.

TomOfTTB3• 15 years ago

Last I heard we were estimated to be spending $533 billion per year in 2015 and that estimate was from 2009 (we've spent a lot more since then). So assuming that's brought us a little closer you can assume we'll be paying $500 billion in the next year or so. Meaning you can look at the One Trillion Visualization and cut it in half.

Only source I could find for this: http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/19/news/economy/debt_interest/i...

sigil2• 15 years ago

Total Federal spending is around $3.5 trillion a year these days. This and lots of other useful information can be found here:

http://usgovernmentspending.com/

ctdonath3• 15 years ago

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm

$385B of this year's spending is just paying interest on the debt. Scale the $1000B (one trillion) picture accordingly.

astrofinch• 15 years ago

So what country should I flee to?

eru4• 15 years ago

Norway. They have a net debt of around -150% of GDP, i.e. they _owe_ money.

nkassis4• 15 years ago

It would have made sense to compare that to total GDP or something other than a building, I find it kind of useless as it is. It's big but seriously you're talking about the largest economy in the world. I don't get all the irrational fear this is supposed to engender in the mind of people.

TomOfTTB3• 15 years ago

Visualizations are never meant to be rational. What they can do, if effective, is over rule other irrational judgments. For instance, I'd contend your view (that the debt is no big deal) is irrational. Had this worked on you it would have at least gotten you to admit it is a big deal.

Just so I don't get accused of making ad hominems let me explain my contention above. You seem to think the size of the debt isn't a big deal because it is small compared to GDP. That would be an effective argument if the question was "will the U.S. go bankrupt"

But when people are assessing how big a problem the debt is the question they are asking is how much it will impact our overall standard of living when we inevitably have to start paying it off. So how big it is in comparison to GDP isn't all that relevant. The question is how much of an impact it will make.

To give an example 10% of your income isn't that big in comparison to your whole income. But if someone were to take that 10% away every month it would have a sizable impact on your overall life.

nkassis4• 15 years ago

"But when people are assessing how big a problem the debt is the question they are asking is how much it will impact our overall standard of living when we inevitably have to start paying it off"

Fair point but will we have to pay it back? That's the funny thing about Government debt, while it's definitively a drag on the economy, the larger it is the larger the economy has to grow but as long as you stay ahead of the interest and roll it over (when bonds expire replace with other bonds...). There is no payoff date or whatever. The gov has infinite life (theoretically) and get take forever to pay it back. The debt can exist (and has existed) forever. Slowly grow forever as long as it's not growing faster than the economy can bare. (this is why I think comparing to GDP is valuable)

Having a deficit every year isn't the problem, it's the size that matters. Surplus are definitively better, not arguing that but paying off the debt is never going to happen, making it smaller is also probably not going to happen significantly for a long time. Until better time show up.

And with the economy right now, you won't manage to get a surplus without completely destroying the standard of living you speak of by eliminating a huge number of gov programs.

You do cuts in good times not bad. The government needs to be able to borrow during the bad economic times. (Unless my understanding of Keynesian economics is completely faulty or you disagree with him completely.

"Just so I don't get accused of making ad hominems let me explain my contention above." I wasn't seeing anything personal in there but thanks for explaining your view. I hope you will see my post the same way.

vilhelm_s• 15 years ago

> Had this worked on you it would have at least gotten you to admit it is a big deal.

But as other commenters noted, how big a deal it is does not have very much to do with the volume of $100 bills.

I can do the same visualization with bananas. Apparently the US imports about 4 million tons of bananas per year[1]. One shipping container contains 17 tons of bananas[2], and measures about 5x2x2 meters [3]. So we need 2.3e5 containers. Stack them on a football field, and they stretch one kilometer into the sky!

From this, we conclude that the US banana dependence is a much bigger deal that the (comparatively trifling) budget deficit. Of course, it would be a different matter if the deficit was printed in $1 bills instead of $100 bills...

[1] http://www.unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/banana/market.htm#imp... [2] http://smallfarmersbigchange.coop/2011/02/21/farm-to-kitchen... [3] http://www.srinternational.com/standard_containers.htm

camiller2• 15 years ago

Nearing 100% of GDP. The only time it was higher, not shown on the chart I am linking to, was during World War II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent...

nkassis4• 15 years ago

Thanks for linking that, I find that very useful. I'll try to find a chart showing change in GDP during those years, I'm going to guess the debt was growing the whole time and GDP was the thing fluctuating.

dxbydt• 15 years ago

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=USA+debt+vs+gdp

In the graph, the debt is clearly starting to go parabolic in the last decade while the gdp stays linear. That's the problem right there viz. no cx can always beat a kx^2 for any c,k 'cause beyond x=(c/k), the kx^2 will win. morover the c is realtively static for a developed first world nation - you are not going to see USA growing at 9 and 10% like India/China. It'll be like 2% and 3% best case cause the US economy is so large growing it even 1% is a monumental task. Whereas the k, once it picks up steam, actually gets really large really fast. Your interest piles up and you can't pay so you borrow more so the rate goes up on you so the interest piles up even faster and repeat...

winternett• 15 years ago

Where is this stack of money located? I'd like to visit it and take a souvenir.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

The money is near the Statue of Liberty.

tmorton• 15 years ago

This is exactly the wrong sort of visualization. It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol."

The US debt is a big number. So big that people have a hard time wrapping their head around it. They need a point of comparison. So what's a good point of comparison for the US debt? Hmm... we could use the federal budget, or GDP, or the world GDP, or the debt of other large nations. Or we could break it down per capita, and compare it to other per-capita things, like income or tax burden. Or... I know! We can convert the thing to hundred dollar bills, and put it next to the statue of liberty! That's a meaningful comparison!

joelhaus• 15 years ago

Agreed. This visualization is only interesting to someone obsessed with the physical size of paper currency.

Planet Money recently did a nice job of comparing the current U.S. debt level and the historic debt levels of other countries to GDP, and how that impacted their economic fate:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/20/138518262/the-tues...

kristiandupont• 15 years ago

I agree although I think this sort of visualization does provide some perspective of how much "trillion" actually means which can be hard to grasp when just seeing the zeroes.

nuromancer2• 15 years ago

The statue of liberty/wtc is somewhat of a silly point of comparison for national debt but grounding numbers into something familiar or in this case physical objects is quite telling for most people. Even if your point of comparison is "the federal budget/GDP/world GDP/debt of other large nations" it goes back to the same issue where you are comparing large numbers to other large numbers which is meaningless to most people(outside of HN). I wouldn't use this type of visualization to brief congress but it is telling.

_delirium• 15 years ago

This rhetoric is very non-specific though, which isn't usually a good feature of visualizations if you want them to be informative (rather than just rhetoric). Any amount of money beyond those that a normal household deals with would take up a lot of physical space with current paper currency, because we don't use bills above $100. Historically, inter-bank transfers actually happened using very large notes, or precious metals; now they go electronically, so paper money isn't set up to deal with macroeconomic sums.

If you want to impress someone with how obscenely large some dollar figure is, you can use exactly this "giant pile of cash" technique from any political perspective! Federal debt is a mountain of cash; Wall Street bonuses are a skyscraper of cash; Google profits are a Manhattan apartment block of cash; Medicare spending is Saturn V rockets full of cash; corporate tax evasion is a stack of dollar bills going to the moon; George Soros's bank account holds 140 metric tons in $1s; etc.

glhaynes• 15 years ago

I think that's just the thing: it's telling, but not of any valuable information. And that's the last thing our political dialog needs right now: we've got a million times too much as it is.

temphn2• 15 years ago

People have physically handled $100 bills and visited the WTC and Statue of Liberty.

You want to explain abstractions in terms of concrete things like this, rather than in terms of other abstractions. And "GDP" is as abstract as it gets.

smcl• 15 years ago

I thought it was pretty sneaky to switch the base size of the tower of money in the WTC pic. For one thing including any rendition of the WTC is a powerful image, one that's usually invoked on purpose to stir emotion. Secondly to inflate, compared to the other pictures, the quantity on display is rather deceptive.

Is it someone with an axe to grind, or a political motivation? The WTC imagery + "WOW LOOK AT THIS DEBT WE SOMEHOW FIND OURSELVES IN ALL OF A SUDDEN" smacks of the Tea Party\far right to me...

archgoon• 15 years ago

I don't think that really works. I've personally have handled a 1 million byte hard drive. So, if I want to understand how big a 1 trillion byte hard drive is, should I picture 1 million 1 megabyte hard drives? I've also got some RAM chips that are about 1 gigabyte in size, should I visualize the terabyte hard drive in terms of them?

reduxredacted• 15 years ago

It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol."

As an accurate, useful comparison it falls short, and there's a political agenda behind it (I hate politics, yet I'm commenting). But people don't regularly wrap their brain around how big a trillion really is. Had the site used sticks, marbles, pebbles or even an illustration related to time, it would have been useful. I remember as a child being taught the difference between a million and a billion in that manner and it was important to my relative understanding of numbers. Most people don't work with big numbers all day and could gain something from just that simple point ... big numbers are big.

It's dishonest, though, and reminds me of why I hate politics. At university, I had a philosophy professor who argued injustice by comparing the percentage of African-Americans on death row vs. other nations of origin, to the percentage of the African-Americans in the US population vs. other nations of origin. He provided those two numbers and much of the class was shocked. The problem is that the US doesn't pick random citizens to be on death row, it picks citizens who are convicted of capital crimes. A more honest comparison (and, still yet, illustrative of the point, though less dramatic) would be to compare the number of African-Americans convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death with the same rates of other minority groups (or even against everyone else as a whole would be an improvement), and then, of course, diving into conviction rates, reasonably provable false conviction rates and the host of other variables that enter into an imperfect system that is imperfect because human beings are imperfect.

EDIT: Improper use of asterisks. Tsk Tsk. Corrected my description of the professor's comparison by adding "vs. other nations of origin" since that's more accurate.

jackpirate• 15 years ago

The problem is that the US doesn't pick random citizens to be on death row

The point of your professor's analysis was not that black people were more likely to be convicted, but that we've created a society where black people are more likely to commit crime. This is still a very serious social problem, if not quite as serious as the hypothetical one you dismiss.

vacri• 15 years ago

The media is full of GDP-based references. Laypeople can't related to GDP, so referencing it isn't very helpful.

eru4• 15 years ago

GDP per capita should be quite easy to relate to for most people.

chrismealy2• 15 years ago

Public debt = net private sector savings. Nobody gets worked up over the private sector saving too much.

walkon• 15 years ago

It absolutely does not. Have you heard of the QE* programs from the Fed?

chrismealy2• 15 years ago

If the Fed buys bonds it's paying cash for them. Net savings doesn't change. It's just changing the duration of the savings.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

That equality holds globally.

It only holds for a particular country if its trade balance is 0. Otherwise, you have to add in the trade deficit/surplus in the equation.

In the case of the US, the trade balance is pretty nonzero. So part of the US public debt is counterbalanced by public assets or private saving in other countries, not private sector savings in the US.

And you do see people worked up over other countries holding US bonds as assets, in fact.

(Or put another way, the Chinese government has a policy regime that forces Chinese consumers to oversave and at the same time does not issue enough of its own public debt to absorb that savings, so part of that savings ends up absorbed by public debt in other countries. Same for Germany and Japan.)

nhaehnle3• 15 years ago

You are right, but then the question is what you do about it.

Imposing austerity measures domestically is going to hurt American citizens long before the trade balance moves sufficiently.

If China is so hell-bent on sending you guys lots of stuff in exchange for numbers in some database, why don't you just sit back and enjoy?

The only way I see to change the trade balance unilaterally from the US point of view would be to impose tariffs and other artificial trade barriers. That would certainly help if your goal is to stop the net imports, but then you have to ask yourself whether you really want that.

csomar2• 15 years ago

What's wrong with debt? With loans I was able to speed up my progress. I took loans two times and ready to take it the next time. You'll need just to be certain that you'll pay off. There is risk, but risk is everywhere you do business.

jodrellblank2• 15 years ago

What's wrong is someone else getting into debt on my behalf, promising to pay it back with money they will take from me by threat of force as taxes, for purposes I wasn't consulted on, to further an unsustainable goal of perpetual growth which is hurrying the arrival of global problems.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

"Government and State 101" in one sentence.

csomar2• 15 years ago

So you need to clarify things: The problem is not with the debt but with the government.

rbranson2• 15 years ago

Debt isn't the problem, it's that it's not paid down when there is a surplus. We chose to cut taxes or create new entitlements instead of paying down the debt.

Postscript: The "take from me by threat of force as taxes" makes you sound like a tea party nutbag or at best an angsty teen that despises parental authority. Perhaps you should have been born in a remote jungle to fend for yourself when you were a child instead of forced to live in a society which protected and educated you? At least you would have been free.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>With loans I was able to speed up my progress. I took loans two times and ready to take it the next time.

sounds like you didn't blow your loans on girls and booze. The people's worries about the government debt, i think, in major part are really worries about where all these moneys have been going. Exponential growth of the amount of "bucks" while flatline [at best] of the total resulting "bang" does rise the question.

username3• 15 years ago

We need 11.45 billion volunteers to work for 92 years.

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

Or (one hopes) agree to give up their social security benefits. I wish my generation could negotiate as a block and say something equivalent to, "We'll surrender any possibility of SS benefits---and still pay payroll tax---in exchange for an assurance that the new paper leeway won't be used as an excuse to spend more."

draggnar• 15 years ago

al jazeera did a very good video showing the greek debt also using pallets (http://www.wesoscrewed.com/2011/07/19/pallets-upon-pallets-o...). there is just something about seeing that amount of money in cash on pallets that makes me sick to my stomach. Talk about a huge hole to climb out of...

scarmig2• 15 years ago

Not a particularly useful exercise. Imagine 100 years from now we've maintained the same debt level. This graph will show just as much information (big numbers are big!) as it does now, but the analytical value of it (if it exists now) will obviously be totally dissipated, as we'll be an order of magnitude richer.

A better comparison would be to take a single person, and put the per capita amount of debt in $100 bills next to them. If you want to get really histrionic, do it with a baby. Still, it won't come up past the ankles (around $15,000).

This isn't a small amount, but at the same time it's not the end of the world. My college loans come out to that amount, and I barely notice paying them monthly.

It's equivalent to having a mortgage-sized to around five times your annual income. An annual income that typically grows 2.5% a year and comes with a machine that prints out money whenever you need it.

Edit: typo in Google search, it's more like $50k than $15k. So a bit worse than that analysis would suggest.

orangecat• 15 years ago

More like $45k.

scarmig2• 15 years ago

Yeah, left off the tens (of trillions) digit when I calculated it.

malbs• 15 years ago

"An annual income that typically grows 2.5%"

If you're lucky enough to work at a company that does actually have a policy of CPI pay increases every year.

Of all the companies I've worked for (7), only 1 did.

Timothee• 15 years ago

As I can't be the only one: CPI is the Consumer Price Index. Basically how much what you pay for something will change over time. (if I understood correctly)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Price_Index

roel_v2• 15 years ago

Of those 7 companies, only one gave raises?

(yes I realize that you are thinking about keeping up with inflation, but my point is that that's irrelevant for the point the grandparent is making)

th0ma5• 15 years ago

Some other physical comparisons that could have been included are actually the size of stacking 400 million people on top of each other, how big that would be, and also how much food they would eat in their lifetime, and how much oil and/or plastic goods they would consume. Other than that, I agree with a lot of the other comments here, big numbers are big. "I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." - HHGTTG

brimpa• 15 years ago

I know this wasn't the point but I definitely didn't know a 747 was that big.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Man. Those graphics are beautifully rendered. What would be the best tool to do something like that?

ulisesroche• 15 years ago

I've always liked (and would have used) Blender for stuff like this.

nl2• 15 years ago

For that graphic to be any use at all, it needs to show the size of the US economy in comparison.

A $400,000 home loan looks pretty big if you visualize it in 1 cent pieces, but if you put it next to a $100,000 salary it looks pretty reasonable.

"US Unfunded Liabilities" is a stupid thing to measure anyway. That's like putting all your household expenses for the next 30 years on mortgage graph. Yes, you will need to pay them, but they aren't a debt at all.

Personally, I prefer seeing debt as a percentage of GDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Measu...

ctdonath3• 15 years ago

The point is they're unfunded: we don't know where the money is coming from, short of raising taxes or printing more. It's like putting the kids' college educations on a graph and realizing there's no current or future income/savings to cover it.

maguay2• 15 years ago

Wait, wait: "Unless the U.S. government fixes the budget, nation's CREDIT CARD debt will topple 15 trillion by Christmas 2011."

Is this meaning US consumer credit card debt? If so, that's hardly the US government budget's fault. That one is odd at best.

maguay2• 15 years ago

Also: "If you like this, support it by checking out the ads on top right."

Right. And it's against Adsense terms to ask people to click your ads. What a mess.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

I understood that as a style figure meaning 'the US government is using borrowed money, like a credit card'. I think it's quite disingenuous.

(maybe I'm wrong - I'd do a first-order validation of the idea by dividing 15 trillion by the amount of us citizens, but I don't quite know now many zeroes there are in 15 trillion and if it's effected by false friends like 'billion' (meaning: 'billion' in English has a different amount of zeroes as the homophones in other languages)).

eru4• 15 years ago

And British English used to use different conventions from American English, too.

known2• 15 years ago

America is safe as long as dollar is world reserve currency

ljf• 15 years ago

The sites creator should watch themselves suggesting people click on the adverts... Good chance they won't end up with the payments, as this breaks nearly all PPC companies ad rules...

known2• 15 years ago

between 1944 to 1963 US personal income tax rate was 92%

gopi• 15 years ago

No self respecting rich guy paid that much...You have to talk about the effective tax rate (both personal and capital gain). This was always around 30% in the last 70-80 years!

So the best thing to do is to abolish all deductions for the rich and reduce the top tax rate to something like 28% (which the new debt commission recommended)

US debt visualized

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