Our Legacy

In the USA, every generation has left things a little better — or
vastly better — than it was left to them, at least that’s how it seems. Sadly, this trend has ended. Here is the legacy we will leave future generations:

A mountain of debt and a degraded environment

The Debt and Economic Decline

As for our legacy, the “birth tax” is now over $36,000 per person (and growing by the second). That’s the portion of the national debt that each new American child inherits at birth. Here’s your share of the debt, to the minute. Each of us owes $256 a month in interest on the debt. ($400 billion / 130 million tax payers)

That’s right. $3,000 a year of the income taxes you pay go to interest on the debt. That is the GOP tax increase paid by every taxpayer.

Since we first started running a debt, to pay for WWII, every single president has paid off a little, except three: Reagan, GHW Bush and GW Bush. Reagan taught “conservatives” they could borrow from our children to create a phony temporary prosperity and no one cares. The debt, now $11 trillion was under $1 trillion when Jimmy Carter left office. The Republicans have proven to be the credit card party of irresponsible borrowing. Need proof? Here! All figures are from the White House website.

National Debt as % of GDP.

In 1981 the gross national debt, compared to the nation’s annual income, reached its lowest point since 1931. Despite his claim to hate the debt, Reagan instituted unprecedented peacetime deficit spending.  This is not partisan politics, this is straight off the White House web site.

As the graph shows, Bush II repeated Reagan’s performance and turned the debt upward again. Bush II’s own Office of Management and Budget provides all the data.

What Is the Source of the Data in the Historic Graph?
The data is from the historical tables in the 2006 OMB Budget as download from WhiteHouse.gov, Historical Tables. It was plotted without modification. Here is the relevant two page Table 7.1 in PDF format.

The data and graph are available in this Excel spreadsheet.

We owe more and more to China and Japan, among others: