Somehow, I managed to stay awake in Social class today, and we were talking about economics. He explained different government spending systems. it boiled down to two ideals; in one, you spend mostly during a recession, and in the other, you spend mostly in an economic boom. One thing that made it difficult to understand is that there isn't really a system that is loyal to either one. In many poor systems, money is hardly ever spent. In rich countries, money is almost always spent, such as the US, where nearly every fiscal budget results in a defecit (I checked this on Wikipedia, and the only presidential term when the debt fell in the last 30 years was Bill Clinton's second term, and predictions say that Barack Obama is going to run the debt higher than Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined). In fact, throughout the history of the US, there has only been one day when there was zero public debt: January 8, 1835.
I'm an analogy person. If you haven't figured that out, then I haven't been trying hard enough. But the US's debt was a big pill to swallow. Then, I found it. Remember the dot-com bubble and bust? The bust happened 10 years ago today. But the basic story is that the dot-com companies were getting lots of money with the promise of a huge return. But they didn't have a plan. Once people figured that out, down goes NASDAQ. Think of the US like that. Not to offend anybody, but there hasn't been a real plan to pull down the public debt since Truman was president (though Clinton did help a bit). But, there are two main differences. One is scale. The United States is the one country that props up the world's economic system. As shown by the recent recession, if the US goes down, so does everybody else. Kind of like the dot-com companies were the main reason that the NASDAQ ever got above 5000. The other difference is the time frame. The dot-com bubble built up for about 3 years. The US has been in debt for 180.
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