On Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump assembled seven charts to explain the national debt under Obama, and began with the assessment of Terence Jeffrey at CNSNews.com, a sister site to NewsBusters. Bump included CNS calculations of how much debt had accumulated per household, per full-time worker and per full-time private sector worker. Bump began:
Since President Obama took office, the national debt has increased by $7.4 trillion. On January 20, 2009, it stood at $10.6 trillion; on Monday, it was at $18 trillion. That bit of data leapt to the front page of The Drudge Report on Tuesday, linking to an assessment from CNS News.com. The increase, the site's Terence Jeffrey writes, "is $65,443 per household, $70,985 per full-time worker and $84,266 per full-time private-sector worker." Grim.
The Post offered seven charts and offered how both sides of the political divide assess the numbers.
The administration likes to brag about its effort to reduce the deficit -- which is fair. After all, you can see in the graph above that deficits have decreased. But the White House uses another metric: the deficit as a function of total economic production, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP)....
Critics of the administration, though, look at the corollary to the above chart: total debt versus GDP. And that's a much bleaker comparison. Debt has gone from a little over 60 percent of GDP to more than 100 percent -- meaning our debt is now equal to our total economic production.
The last piece the Drudge Report posted from CNS about the debt focused not on Obama, but on House Speaker John Boehner's spending deals with the president.
