If you READ my posts, I said that it also had to do with the amount of money in circulation.
Yes, inflation is affected by the amount of money in circulation.
and if you hadn't noticed banks all over the world have been printing money like it's going out of fashion under the name of quantitative easing.
BASICALLY.
by your two measures, either the price of gold -well that's way up, so adjust for inflation and you end up in the position that it's not as bad as it first looks.
or, look at the money in circulation, of which thanks to QE there is more.
so again adjust for the inflation that creates and you end up in the same position.
that's where the problem is, at first glance you say silly man added more to the debt than anyone before him.
that's a fact, he's added near six trillion to the debt, that's not only more than anyone else before him (as a big number) but of you take a president like Washington, it's also more money than there was in the entire world! -at that time.
I.E other presidents have added lots of debt, and as a percentage of GDP things have been worse.
the point is, if you just regurgitate random facts from policy sites that happen to agree with the team that you side with, without understanding the core facts below, it makes for a fairly baseless argument!
so whichever of the ways or measures that YOU stated, when you account for inflation by whatever way YOU stated you prove your own argument wrong! if not wrong then at least massively reduced.
I should probably say in big letters now, make no mistake, you're still all shafted cause that's a bloody huge pile of money that you owe!
I don't think that the man is fiscally responsible at all.
I do think that he (like a lot of other people in charge before him) is a lot more bothered about being remembered than actually doing good.
and that sort of ego mania whilst present in most if not all politicians doesn't make for good governance...
but again this is where that world market comes into play.
because it's not just the nation that owns that debt, (i.e it's not just government bonds or pensions savings, but also other countries that have bought bonds from the government.
i.e a part of that 6 trillion is also yen and yuan, (in fact china is a huge buyer of US dollars), with that country so rapidly developing, is actually turns out that the issue is lessened due to inflation there as well.
i.e you owe china 1bn dollars, that converts to 1tn of their money.
1 on their money used to be a farmers wages for a day.
however, as wages go up there, things are becoming more expensive there, inflation all over the world in other countries that you are debtors to helps reduce the VALUE (though not the total) of the debt.
that 1tn of their money used to be 1tn loaves of bread, now it's not.
that's why money at a government level and Global finance of interconnected economies is so very difficult to understand.
then when you also start talking about structured vs unstructured debt it gets even more difficult.
basically though, government loans are very different to personal loans, in a personal loan you have a normal maximum repayment term of 35 years (mortgage) and an interest rate of say 2% above base rate. (for my country this is 2.5% though most mortgage lenders will charge 3 - 5% on a loan. (lets say 5%)
with inflation running at 3.5% if you leave the loan without any repayments, the loan VALUE and total always increases, e.g last year you owed 100,000, this year you own 105,000.
last year 100,000 bought a million tins of beans, his year a million tins of beans actually costs 103,500 . (where the commodity market I choose to reference here is food) so you see my debt is not only a 5,000 bigger number, but I also need and extra 2000 odd "insert commodity here" to pay it off...
government bonds are sold on 100 year terms, and have a current interest rate (in my country of 0.5%)
thus if the us borrows 100,000 from the UK next year the US will owe the UK 100,500.
you see the point here, now the US only needs nine hundred thousand odd tins of beans to pay back the government loan.
you inflate the price of the commodity at a rate that is lower than that of the interest rate, governments *Can* inflate their debs away.
However, uncontrolled inflation is pretty bad.
quantitative easing (that both of our governments has been doing works out terrible for anyone who actually HAS got money, (look around that's actually more than you think) what this means is that any one with money, who has invested in government bonds (savers in pension scheme -I.e MOST) have only seen a rate of return of a couple of percent IF they are lucky, mean while QE has been putting inflation into overdrive, which has actually reduced the VALUE of their savings, - though the monetary amount may have gone up, the value of that money has gone down.
you may ask WHY would a government (any government) lend at a rate lower than it's inflation rates given that it is effectivly giving away money.
well, the idea is that if we have that money now, then it's good to spend it, in long term investments that will ensure that there is money coming into the country when times are harder...
AND when you're done doing all of that weird maths, you think figure out how different countries have different rates at which they can borrow at! so a banker in London can walk into the Bank of England and say I want to borrow 1bn money (we'll use the words money to make it easy and not worry about currency signs or conversions).
he borrows said money at 0.5%
he then tells a guy in the government of your country he's willing to lend at a rate of 1%, your government jumps at the chance, because not only can they over the next hundred years, inflate the value of that debt to nothing, but also, they can take that same billion money and lend it to Greece at 3.5%.
the London banker, and the US government all made money.
the UK government get's it's assured return of income, (useful for long term strategy planning).
the US gets free money -because it inflates it's debt to nothing.
AND it has sold a bond and so should get a regular and steady return on that bond -useful for long term planning...
Does that start to make a bit more sense now?
I'm not taking the mick when I tell you that knowing about economics is more than understanding that the value of pumpkin farms rise from early summer as yield can start to be estimated, but then fall off right after Halloween when we suddenly have no appetite for them!
Working in a shop IS useful, and can teach you in real terms and real time about stock levels, seasonal sales etc, and therefore if and when you have a spare bunch of money you can gamble it with a bit more prowess than I could without that experience on a stock market. but it's not going to teach you a lot about global interconnected economies.
(as a side note I'm pretty sure you can't just wander into the Bank of England and ask for a billion quid).
As for sandy hook being a government conspiracy.
I'm yet to see any real or compelling evidence, there are things like that largely debunked video.
interesting that the editor says that they grew up "searching for the truth" in 9/11 reports etc, it seems to work on the same theory, "government is Bad and would do anything -including murder it's own civilians to get what it wants".
I'm not convinced.
show me real and compelling evidence. and I'd be more convinced. (i.e I'm not a closed book on the subject I like a good conspiracy as much as the next).
and various, wars, weapons test, virus vaccine tests, etc have shown that when you get to an "untouchable" place in government you can do some pretty messed up stuff and get away with it.