STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 1 May 2013

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20. public debt and economic growth

http://www.nationofchange.org/public-debt-and-economic-growth-1367329656


In the election of 1952 my father voted for Dwight Eisenhower. When I asked him why he explained that “FDR’s debt” was still burdening the economy — and that I and my children and my grandchildren would be paying it down for as long as we lived.

I was only six years old and had no idea what a “debt” was, let alone FDR’s. But I had nightmares about it for weeks.

Yet as the years went by my father stopped talking about “FDR’s debt,” and since I was old enough to know something about economics I never worried about it. My children have never once mentioned FDR’s debt. My four-year-old grandchild hasn’t uttered a single word about it.

By the end of World War II, the national debt was 120 percent of the entire economy. But by the mid-1950s, it was half that.