A quickly rising sea

Nate asks: Do you have the figures on total debt vs. the GDP?

As of today, the national debt is $7,122,841,728,666.17. Of course, this doesn’t include the 50 State debts, or the various county, city and local debts. The national GDP is $10.5 trillion, so the debt-to-GDP ratio is 67.83 percent. That’s about twice what I’ve seen officially reported elsewhere, but then, many of those numbers are as many as three years old, when the debt was only 80 percent of what it is now. As of March, it’s also growing at an annual rate of 7.3 percent of GDP, so would hit Italianate levels of 100 percent in 2011.

By the way, based on a notion I put forward my discussion last week with Strange and AA, this would suggest that the USA is markedly more socialist than we’d been thinking then and that such socialism is growing ever more quickly. Thank goodness it won’t slow down our economic growth at all!

UPDATE: DR writes: Here’s some more numbers for you:Total US household equity: $45,000,000,000.000 Total unfunded US government liability: $44,000,000,000,000 Source: Fannie Mae and, I think GAO. Do you suppose it’s just a coincidence?

I suppose they figure that their lenders figure they can always grab the equity. After all, as Nate pointed out, they technically own it all anyhow. That $300k you laid out for a mortgage only makes you a higher class of renter. Can anyone confirm these numbers?