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Mark Friedman

Apr 11, 2013 at 12:42 AM

Comment from Sara Larner, Athenian student: I felt that the overall concept behind the video was interesting, but my main issue was that they just seemed to collect random opinions without analyzing the ideas and information in those opinions. For instance one person mentioned the US debt being an issue at one trillion dollars. The US debt is actually so very much more complicated than that. If you were to look at the amount of money that we owe, as a single simple number it would actually be closer to 17 trillion dollars. But that number isn't right either, because most of those governments/people/corporations in turn owe the US money, and a lot of it is owed by states to the US or owed by the US to the US. When all of that is taken into account the federal debt comes closer to 3.5 trillion dollars. But that still isn't an accurate portrayal of our countries finance situation. Because a country being in debt is massively different from a person being in debt to the point where there should be different words for the two things. My point being: our debt is actually not an issue, really. It could become an issue, if left unattended, but so could most things. The US debt is actually at a decently healthy level (and more than 80% of it is internal so there is literally no chance of us defaulting).