By Patricia L Johnson

Someone sent me a link to a web site and I’m going to use a few sentences from it as an example of how easily people are swayed.

When you look at a web site and the owner claims to be a "Ph.D. economist", you automatically assume the person has some knowledge of the subject at hand, but do they?

You don’t have to read too far down on the web site to find the following sentence:

"First, be careful, the deficit is annual additions to national debt."

The statement is somewhat misleading – the deficit is not "annual additions" to the national debt.

Our government is just like any other entity, it maintains books for recording accounting activity called the national income and product accounts.  The difference between our government current receipts and disbursements in these accounts has been called a surplus if results end in a positive number and a deficit if results end in a negative number. 

Both surpluses and/or deficits are additions to the national debt.  Surpluses decrease the amount of the national debt, while deficits increase the national debt.

This site then contains a few charts and other mutterings and goes on to state the basis for his charts.

…The annual deficit is how much the debt increases each year. On any day we can ask how much the annual deficit was over the preceeding year and find it by subtracting the national debt a year ago from what it is now…

…That’s how the graphs above were made…"

Based on the formula we took the national debt as of October 18, 2007 and subtracted the national debt as of October 18, 2006 for a total of $513 billion plus some change, which according to the formula should be the deficit for the preceding year.

$9,053,431,790,817.60  10/18/2007

$8,540,051,729,781.32  10/18/2006

$   513,380,061,036.28 – Difference

The U.S. deficit for fiscal year 2007 was $163 billion based on receipts of $2,568 billion and outlays of $2,731 billion.

If a web site is using graphs as a visual aid to the point they are making and the graphs are based on an erroneous formula, how much credence can you give to the information on the web site?

I’m not going to include the link to this web site because I don’t believe in promoting information that’s not correct.

There is only one purpose of this post and that is to act as a reminder to all of us that you cannot believe everything you read, no matter how knowledgeable the person is that’s writing the material.  The Internet has made it possible for all of us to be inundated with material on any subject under the sun.  The fact that a person is educated in a particular field does not necessarily make them an expert.

Most of us don’t have time to even read the news, much less research what’s written, but that’s basically what you have to do in today’s world of misinformation and bias.