"Fighting" with my Father Leads to Interesting Results

I fight my family politically all the time. They send these ridiculous emails out and quote statistics. I never have any stats on my side to back my reasoning up, but I always research later and find out I was right. That being said, today I'm investigating our national debt. And believe it or not, I'm going to use my research as a lesson for my Algebra II kids! I went to the treasury department's website and found the U.S. debt for each year dating back to 1791. Crazy what you can find on the web, huh?
Check out the graphs I made:


Sorry they're a little blurry. They're screen shots that went into paint, then through Blogger and then were enlarged. What I get out of this data is that our debt is growing at an astounding rate (duh). In GWB's presidency, the debt was raised by roughly $500 million per year. Under Obama's presidency, the debt is rising at $2 billion per year. Wow. That's 4 times as fast!

Check out the large dip in our debt in the 1830-1840's. I've never heard of that. At one point, the U.S. debt was only $33,733.05. My college loan debt is just about that much!!! But we were right up there in the next ten years or so.

One of the reasons I read so many blogs, newspapers, articles, and listen to NPR is that I'm trying to get a good handle on what is actually happening in our country. I want to know who I should support and of whom I should be weary. It makes sense, to me, to be aware of what is going on in our world so that we can be ready at a moment's notice if something major changes. It's great that we have food in our pantry and 72 hour kits upstairs, but if we don't work to be mentally and intellectually prepared in our lives, then it's all for naught.

Since I live so close to DC, I get scared probably more easily than a lot of you out there. If someone nukes the capital (God forbid), I have a very short period of time to leave. I am thankful that I have moved a little further outside of the fallout range, but I am still close enough that a stiff wind will cause major issues in our lives.