US Public Debt – historical

In a recent “debate” with a friend, I looked for historical data about the US public debt. I found Google Public Data, which has info about the annual budget deficit/surplus, but apparently (oddly) doesn’t have the debt. Odd because this info is available on the Treasury website.

I copied & pasted the data into Google Docs and made a chart of my own and some basic comparisons over time. Here are some of them rendered as images, though the scale makes the horizontal access kind of useless. I tried embedding the interactive Flash-based graph but it didn’t work. Oh well.

{“dataSourceUrl”:”//spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/tq?key=0Arz9JIGL5KjodGlHZjZyRE9YXzBRd0JpVDRKWkE1d0E&transpose=0&headers=1&range=A1%3AC461&gid=0&pub=1″,”options”:{“displayAnnotations”:true,”title”:””,”backgroundColor”:”#FFFFFF”,”legend”:”right”,”logScale”:false,”wmode”:”opaque”,”hAxis”:{“maxAlternation”:1},”hasLabelsColumn”:true,”width”:550,”height”:400},”state”:{},”chartType”:”AnnotatedTimeLine”,”chartName”:”US Public Debt”}