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.