>>>I think with that analogy, it may be more applicable to say that although your debt went up a net $25, it had been going up by a much faster amount before. And in that time period, you took in more than you spent for the first time in a long time, and used some of that surplus to pay your debt.
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>>Also, you do not know if I used a cash advance check from MasterCard to pay down my VISA bill which is not unlike shifting public debt to intragov debt.
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>If I am understanding you correctly, you are implying that the Clinton administration borrowed from the Intragovernmental Holdings category to make payments in the Public Debt category. Is that what you are saying?
I do not know that that happened. I just see 2 categories of debt and both have to be paid down. Even though the publicly held debt [e.g., savings bonds, t-bills, etc] may have gone down, but the intergov debt went up at a big enough rate to where the overall federal debt continued to increase every year. Sounds dubious to me to claim the "debt" went down when what you really mean is the National
public debt went down but we'll not tell them the overall National debt went up.
Mark McCasland
Midlothian, TX USA