“That’s the national debt of the United States of America. Yesterday, we surpassed the $18 trillion mark for the first time.
“Partisan and or political inferences will not be entertained.”
There you go. Do you feel informed now?
It’s hard to see what information anyone could get from this comment other than the U.S. debt is a really big number and presumably someone at Marketplace radio thinks its too big. (The latter information is ordinary reserved for designated commentaries and opinion pieces.)
Last year, the NYT committed itself to trying to put numbers like this in some context that would make them meaningful to their audience. David Leonhardt, who was then the Washington bureau chief, even joked about how the sort of reporting in this Marketplace segment is the same as telling their audience “really big number.”
It would not have been difficult to put the $18 trillion figure in a context that would be more meaningful. Economists usually measure debt relative to GDP. That’s a pretty simple calculation. If it wanted to give us the economic impact of the debt, it could have told us that the interest rate on long-term debt is a bit over 2.2 percent, well below normal levels. If it wanted to report on the burden to taxpayers, it could have told us that interest payments are equal to roughly 1.3 percent of GDP, less than half the burden in the early 1990s.
This information, all of which can be obtained in seconds from the Congressional Budget Office, would have allowed listeners to better understand the importance of the $18 trillion debt figure.
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