Wayne Harris - Lee Lofaso  writes:

> Hi, Lee!
>
> Lee Lofaso - Wayne Harris  writes:
>
>> Hello Wayne,
>>
>>  WH> [...]
>>
>>  WH>>> So here's a pretty simple question.  Is there an _official_
>>  WH>>> reporter of the US national debt?  (If so, where does it show
>>  WH>>> it the amount?)
>>
>>  >> The Department of the Treasury.
>>  >> The stats can be viewed online.
>>
>>  WH> That makes perfect sense.  I get to
>>  WH>  
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Markets/Pages/national-debt.aspx
>>  WH> and then I go to
>>  WH>   https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/pd.htm
>>
>>  WH> The question is which report tells me the total national debt and
where.
>>  WH> I'm not interested in budget deficits or anything.  I just to see how
>>  WH> and where does the Treasury report the total national debt.  Can you
>>  WH> point an accurate arrow to it?  I appreciate that!  Thanks!
>>
>> Here is a site that breaks it down in chunks, year by year -
>>
>> https://www.thestreet.com/politics/national-debt-year-by-year-14876008
>
> Wonderful!  Thanks so much for this.

Here's an interesting passage.

  ``[...] At the time Hamilton called for such action, the states owed a
  collective $25 million (approximately $684 million in today's
  terms). [...]''  -- Eric Reed

Clearly, the reporter is able to update an old value to the loss of
value over the course of inflation.  How can I confirm his arithmetic?
I'll read an entire book to learn how to do that, if anyone can point me
out a nice publication on the topic.

But, in fact, with the little we've been learning, we could even take a
guess at producing such measures.  We have the total public debt.  Maybe
we can produce a measure of the loss of value out of the increase in the
public debt relative to a past point in time.  We can then update that
old value to ``today's terms'' and see how we get.

Let's assume Eric Reed's table are all correct.  (We previously took a
small sample and verified it to the cent and it looked good.)  From 1790
to 2018 the total public debt went from 71060508.50 to 21516058183180.20.
This must be encoding the loss in dollar value.  How much does
71060508.50 compare to 21516058183180.20?  We can say that the debt in
1790 is roughly

  3.30 * 10^{-6}

percent of the debt today.  Perhaps we can say that the loss of value of
currency is directly proportional to the total monetary supply.  Let's
try that.  If we take the total debt as a measure of the monetary supply
both in 1790 and today, we get a loss of 3.30 * 10^{-6} in each dollar.

Similarly, we can see how much each dollar in 1790 would compare to
today's dollar.  We can measure such thing by dividing the total debt
today by the total debt in 1790, getting

  302785.02979162044

as the increase in value.  Therefore, to know how much 25 million in
1790 is today, we multiply 25 million by the number above, getting

  7,569,625,744,790.511

which is a far larger amount than the 684 million computed by Eric Reed.
We are likely wrong.  (If we would reduce 684 million by that loss
factor we computed, we'd get roughly 2,259 dollars, which is much less
than 25 million dollars.  We don't get close either way.  What did we
learn?  That are very likely wrong on this attempt.)

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