BillShrink has posted an infographic showing America’s National Debt. What I find interesting is that they not only look at the historical values for the national debt in terms of GDP and undeflated dollars, they also include what the coming years may mean for the debt if trends continue.
For all the talk about China being our biggest lender, BillShrink correctly shows that Japan is our number one lender, for now. Their source for the data is listed as Wikipedia. While it might have been nice to get it from government sources, it turns out that Wikipedia and thus BillShrink, get it correct.
Interestingly enough, they also take a look at two of the valuable assets that America has: gold and oil. Could we use those to pay off the debt? The public debt that is outstanding is about $8 Trillion. Of that, foreign countries hold about $3.689 Trillion. Our gold and oil holdings total about $358 Billion. Thus if we gave foreign countries all our gold and oil we could only pay off a tithe of the debt we owe to foreign countries.
via : Visualizing America’s National Debt
Thanks for posting.