American citizens and people throughout the world have had reason to be very concerned and upset by the United States’ financial condition and the very real prospect of a default on its mountain of debt — and the spectacle of a deeply divided government seemingly unable to get to practical solution.
What may startle observers is how the United States has joined a short, and not so distinguished list of nation’s whose debt ratings have a S & P Outlook for 2011 of Negative. That fact was revealed in a recent graphic AP interactive that provide an overview of the debt crises.
I decided to explore the information and discovered – as often happens with charts and graphics on the Internet – that it was built using faulty data.
When I looked at the World debt section, I found I got different
Gross Domestic Product numbers from the selected countries. For instance, the interactive “select country” box showed the GDP for the U.S. was $2.2 trillion while the map mouse-over showed the correct number of $14.7 trillion. I also found some missing countries on the map.
That becomes important in looking at debt as a percent of GDP. In that regard, the U.S. ranks 38th globally in public debt as a percent of GDP (at 58.9%), according the CIA World Factbook, and well below Japan, which tops the list at 229%.
Still, only a handful of nations earned a negative ratings outlook on the S & P Outlook for 2011 (indicated in red in the map above) and listed below:
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Government workers and their contractors are intensely interested in everything that is being said about Gov 20 now and would like a place where they could get a distillation and visualization of that. Well today we can show you one solution that provides some interesting insights!
Chris Holden, Community Manager for Recorded Future, helped me use their tool for visualization of Gov20 events on the Internet from over 25,000 sources dating back to May. Keep reading →
I have talked about Recorded Future in several of my data stories published on Breaking Gov and how they mine more than 25,000 Internet sources and are backed by the CIA and Google.
Chris Holden, Community Manager for Recorded Future, and I met recently to talk about how we could mine and visualize people’s quotes about the debt ceiling debate so much in the news and on people’s minds right now. The initial result is shown above. Keep reading →
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A recent story tried to answer this question as follows: If the committee process fails to produce a debt reduction plan, as much as $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts would kick in — evenly divided between defense and non-defense spending.
The highlight of yesterday’s 
Last month, I attended the
Recovery.gov
See the