On a related note

You can very quickly decide whether a piece on the public debt is worth reading by looking for explanations of the explosion of debt in the last few years that sound like this: "But after four years in office Gordon Brown took out the country's credit card and let rip."


This is accompanied by the following graph

Now it's not entirely clear what the red and the blue are supposed to represent. Certainly not Labour governance, as they took back the House of Commons in 1997. Rather it seems to be Brown governance. Now notice that there are two big spikes in the data, and possibly a third if we go back to pre-1977. Now one comes under Tory rule, and the other under Labour rule. What do they seem to have in common? Houw about the onset of a recession and the resulting collapse in revenue and increase in the automatic stabilizers of unemployment insurance and the like. 


In fact, the major cause of the spike in deficits is not increased spending but rather collapsing demand. Here is the American data, from James Kwak

Or from the Center for Budget and Economic Priorities

In short, when you read statements such as "But after four years in office Gordon Brown took out the country's credit card and let rip" as an explanation for the current size of the deficit, you should be on guard for some nonsense streaming your way.