US Public Debt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
Countries by public Debt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
Debt to GDP ratio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio
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http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/the-change-in-americas-debt-by-presidential-term/
The Change in America’s Debt by Presidential Term
By Barry Ritholtz - November 5th, 2012, 12:00PM
Americans donate $8 million to cut national debt
@CNNMoney November 20, 2012: 10:19 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The debate about the national debt has already paid off: Individual Americans pitched in nearly $8 million of their own money to help reduce it in fiscal 2012. That's more than double the total from the year before.
Donations for the national debt had averaged about $3 million a year since 2009. "So this is obviously a big jump," said Mckayla Braden, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of the Public Debt.
But even this year's hefty total of $7.7 million is barely a drop in the bucket. That sum represents just 0.000007% of the approximately $1.1 trillion deficit the U.S. ran in the latest fiscal year.
The country's total outstanding debt is more than $16 trillion -- perilously close to the $16.394 trillion debt ceiling, and the Treasury Department expects to hit the legal borrowing limit by the end of this year.
The ongoing national debate about how to get America's debt under control has certainly heightened the public's awareness of the matter.
Diane Lim Rogers, chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a grassroots organization focused on eliminating federal budget deficits, believes that donations are up because more people realize the dangers of a massive deficit.
"I think this is a small minority of people signaling to the world that their taxes should be higher," she said.
The whole idea of accepting donations to help pay down the national debt didn't exist until 1961, when an anonymous estate left $20 million to theBureau of Public Debt for just that purpose. Congress had to pass a law in order to be able to accept the money, and a total of $85 million has poured into the bureau's coffers in the 51 years since then.
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