And your point is? Interesting that you refer, in your second paragraph, "to national debt, which is indeed "large"", compared to what? I used the term "large" and you argued it. Now you use the same term, without reference to anything. I could say a mouse was large. Compared to an elephant it's small. I said our government had a large debt. Compared to "other OECD nations" it's not large. All I said was it's large, and you argued that point. Compared with the USA, our national debt is minuscule, yet you call it "indeed large". On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 7:31 AM, Lev Lafayette <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:
On Fri, November 7, 2014 4:21 am, Michael Scott wrote:
Relative terms can be used differently by both sides of politics, depending on which way you want to look at them.
Absolutely. Thus the importance of reviewing all relative claims in context.
Hence I often find references to "national debt" which is indeed large, but includes public and private debt.
Sometimes commentators refer to "gross government debt" commonly cited, which doesn't take into account monies owed to the government.
A more sophisticated commentator refers to "net government debt", but sometimes without specifying whether this is all public debt by all three sectors of government.
Then there are those who will refer to "net Federal government debt", but not adjust it for inflation, i.e., they'll provide nominal rather than real values.
Finally, even if all this is done, the reference to "real net Federal government debt" is done without context of overall GDP.
-- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
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