The Debt as a Share of GDP Joke

The Peter Peterson Gang and its accomplices like to scare people with talk of the extraordinarily high debt-to-GDP ratio. As folks familiar with economics know, the nominal value of the debt means almost nothing. Insofar as we can talk meaningfully of a burden being imposed on our children it would be the interest that we have to pay on the debt. This is actually near a post-war low measured as a share of GDP. This measure nets out the interest payments that are rebated from the Fed to the Tr...