WHAT DEBT CRISIS?

There is, in fact, no national public debt crisis that merits the apocalyptic tone of the reports that issue from the White House, unless it is admitted that such economic stalwarts as Singapore, Germany, and Brazil are in worse trouble than is the United States.

The CIA Factbook of 2010 lists 128 countries and the public debt of each as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. The United States, with sovereign debt estimated to be 14-trillion 780-billion dollars in 2010, is number 36, its debt-to-GDP ratio 59.3. That's well behind Singapore's 102.4 and Germany's 83.2. It's lower than the average of all the listed countries: 59.3.

The "burden" of sovereign debt amounting to more than 80 percent of its GDP has not impeded Germany in producing and distributing a greater dollar value of tradable manufactured goods than any other country than China, which edged past Germany during 2009's global economic readjustment. Nor has it prevented the United States from holding third place in that ranking.

The United States emerged from World War Two owing 117.5% of the value of its GDP, but that was no obstacle to its three decades of prosperity without significant inflation. What's more, the fruits of the good times of 1945-1975 were more equally shared than they have been since.

Income equality, measured by the Gini Index, fell during the 1930s and 1940s to a low of 38.6 in 1968 - the lowest ever reported. It then rose, gradually and then more steeply, as successive presidential administrations rejected the egalitarian and redistributionist values of the New Deal, to a high of 47 in 2006.

It's likely that the spending policies of the 1930s through the 1960s made the US more prosperous that it might have been if a policy of radical debt reduction and budget balancing been pursued during the middle years of the 20th century.