Scale
Global debt is of great concern since interest payments can often place great demands on governments and individuals. This has led to calls for universal debt relief for poorer countries.
A less extreme and more innovative measure would be to permit civil society groups in every nation to buy the debt in exchange for minority equity positions in community organizations. Even in dictatorships, the combination of banks and civil society power could force land reform and overthrow unaccountable governments, since the people and banks would be aligned against the oppressive government.
Using a debt to GDP ratio is one of the most accepted measures of assessing a nation's debt. For example, in theory one of the criteria of admission to the European Union's Euro currency is that a country's debt should not exceed 60% of that country's GDP.
The debt of the United States over time is documented online at the Department of the Treasury's website TreasuryDirect.
Read more about this topic: Government Debt
Famous quotes containing the word scale:
“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;Mnot hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,—not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)