Funny graph

Corey Yanofsky pointed me to this:

chart-debtunderrule.jpg-thumb-410x249.jpeg

This is a fun one–it has so many flaws, I hardly know where to begin.

This one is also interesting, in that they seem to have decided retroactively to blame the Democrats as of January, 2007. Fair enough, I guess. In retrospect, I’m surprised the Congressional Republicans and the McCain campaign didn’t try this tactic in the 2008 campaign–to say that, sure, the economy is a disaster but it’s the fault of the Congressional Democrats. Maybe the “economy is fundamentally strong” pitch wasn’t such a good idea.

It’s hard to see that arguments about the national debt will convince many people right now. But, stepping back a bit, the role of the Republican campaign right now can’t really be to change policy or even to convince a majority of Americans that Obama and the Democrats are doing things wrong. Rather, the short-term goal has got to be to keep up morale among the base. I don’t know that the deficit is a great talking point there either, but maybe it is; I imagine they’ve done some polling.

P.S. Yes, I’m happy to comment on silly Democratic graphs too–just send ’em in!

8 thoughts on “Funny graph

  1. Funny graph?

    No I think the graphs are very sad. I live in the US and come from Sweden and these graphs are an exact depiction of what happened in Sweden in the early 70s. Massive unfunded government spending, gigantic entitlements programs.

    Sweden had an extremely charismatic new prime minister, he doubled raised taxes by 50
    % as a portion of GDP, trebled the public sector and demonized, punished small business owners, entrepreneurs.

    As a consequence Sweden that in the late 60s had had the best welfare system in the world and was one of the most wealthiest economies 3rd. Fell to number 17th by 1990, had eradicated small business owners (Sweden has the fewest small and mediums sized businesses per capita in the developed world, OECD), most entrepreneurs were hounded to emigrate, IKEA, Tetra Pak etc. The Swedish social security system was set to collapse by mid 90s.

    So I do not understand why most US Democrats want to go the Swedish 70s and not the polices of the 90s or 50s-60s.

    What most Americans do not understand that Sweden today is one of the worlds least regulated countries in general and the financial sector in particular. Companies has virtually no regulations other than labor and environment.

    Compared to the US Sweden is as close as you can get to a free market society, the difference is the high taxes.

  2. I tried playing around with transformations and y^4 looked slightly similar (if you squint just right), and as far as I know there's a good econometric justification for such a transformation. I mean, what with inflation and money supply levels and animal spirits and all that.

  3. Yeah, it goes with the 5th-order polynomial fit that came up a couple weeks ago in our discussion of the econometric analysis of basketball games.

  4. Really quick replot of the data presented with linear scale, which shows a slight lessening of the slope: out.png.

    It'd be nice to see the original jpg rescaled appropriately to show the distortion.

    Is there an R data source for the detailed OPM debt data?

  5. Michael: Your plot is helpful in that it highlights the suspiciousness of having no points between 1990 and 2007. Now we just have to figure out how to get watermarked Nancy Pelosi images into R graphs.

  6. I guess I did not understand the vertical scale at all. The difference of 5.77 from 1990 to 2007 should be larger than 3.31 from 2009 to 2012. Is there a log scale (or classic 5th degree polynomial) that fits this version of the truth?

    The projection that the Democratic majority will stretch well into the future might make some think that the Republicans are resigned to be the opposition party indefinitely.

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