National Debt

[Bonzo 2000]

The UK National Debt is current around £1400 Billion. If we are meant to be one of the worlds wealthiest nations, are there any countries that operate without a national debt?

[jake-the-peg]

http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/budget_surplus_or_deficit_2012_0.html

Countries positive here have a surplus - mostly small nations or oil rich ones.

[Zacs-Master]

You ahve to take GDP into consideration to get a true picture. This might help (you can click on each country):
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp

[ToraToraTora]

It's also worth pointing out that the national debt is only about 140% of GDP, not good by any means but it's like someone earning 50k having 70k outstanding on their mortgage, ie no where near as bad as it's painted.

[Zacs-Master]

Do you know TTT, I was going to say that......Oh, hang on....

[jake-the-peg]

Well not quite like that because National debt continues to change as we continue to borrow

More like a credit card, it's whether the national debt is continuing to rise than what it happens to be at at any point in time.

So this story is not so good

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/public-sector-debt-perc-gdp-hmT.png

Despite all the efforts of the government the national debt is still rising

But if you look at the longer history the national debt is nothing compared to what it was after the war

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/national-debt-percent-1900-12.png

[Hypognosis]

We only finished paying back the Americans for WWII loans as recently as 200x

Newsnight triumphantly announced this fact, leaving me with the mistaken impression that UK was utterly debt free at a time when Brown was still Chancellor.

Not so. Just that this particular debt item was closed on the books.

Unfortunately, the graph you pointed to does not seem to distinguish between the US war loans and ordinary government borrowing.

I guess we got out of that problem because post-war was an economic boom time, thanks to all the wrecked things needing to be rebuilt. "War is good for business" as the apocryphal saying has it.