Most people will come up with a subjective answer to the question, and answer depending on whether they feel better or not. But let's see how you could answer the question more quantitatively.
(Now this may take a little math, so if you think it might be too painful, there is a nurse at the back of the room with Novocain!)
Lets start simple. Lets pick a metric (that's just something that you can measure). Lets pick something simple that is pretty easy to understand. For this example we will use the U.S. national debt. We can find that value for every year and examine the trends to see if it is going up or going down, and then decide if that is better or worse. Here are some figures for Gross Public Dept from 1997 to 2012:
| Year | Administration | Gross Public Debt-total $ billion nominal |
| 1997 | Clinton-2.1 | 6,590.71 |
| 1998 | Clinton-2.2 | 6,761.75 |
| 1999 | Clinton-2.3 | 6,974.78 |
| 2000 | Clinton-2.4 | 7,080.52 |
| 2001 | Bush- 1.1 | 7,320.74 |
| 2002 | Bush- 1.2 | 7,879.78 |
| 2003 | Bush- 1.3 | 8,578.76 |
| 2004 | Bush- 1.4 | 9,331.24 |
| 2005 | Bush- 2.1 | 9,990.33 |
| 2006 | Bush- 2.2 | 10,655.37 |
| 2007 | Bush- 2.3 | 11,355.45 |
| 2008 | Bush- 2.4 | 12,538.60 |
| 2009 | Obama- 1.1 | 14,559.52 |
| 2010 | Obama- 1.2 | 16,412.91 |
| 2011 | Obama- 1.3 | 18,338.96 |
| 2012 | Obama- 1.4 | 19,459.58 |
We're going to start with something simple, so hang in there. Lets take to points, now and 4 years ago:
A) 2012 - Debt = $19.6 Trillion
B) 2008 - Dept = $12.5 Trillion
Now the difference is 7.1 Trillion dollars, which is an average change (7.1 / 4) of about 1.8 per year. Now this 1.8 trillion dollars per year is the simple rate of increase in the debt.
A rate of change is what we call a velocity in physics, and if you know where your are and your velocity, you can predict where you will be in a given amount of time in the future. For example, you can answer questions such as, "if you leave Chicago on the 9:10 train, traveling at 80 mph, can you get to Galesburg in time for the kickoff of the Monmouth game?" Back to our example, if the rate of change in the debt were to remain the same, we could predict the future dept just by adding 1.8 trillion dollars for every year in the future. Now this gets us some large numbers, but it's not the whole story.
Back in high school drivers ed., you probably had a guest speaker from the state police giving a talk on highway safety, and I'm sure the phrase "speed kills" came up. Now speed can be dangerous, but speed, or velocity, by itself is quite harmless. You can be walking at 4 mph, driving at 60 mph, or flying a plane at 300 mph, and be completely save and comfortable. The problem is if your car, traveling at 60 mph, hits a bridge abutment and your velocity suddenly decreases to 0 mph. This is acceleration, or change in velocity. It is actually the acceleration, not the speed that kills you. Even if the steering column hadn't driven straight through your heart when you hit the bridge abutment, the g forces of accelerating from 60 mph to 0 mph in a few milliseconds would have cause fatal damage to your body.
Back to economics: If we look at the debt figures again, we will note that the dept is not only increasing, but the rate of change is also changing, which is an acceleration:
| Year | Administration | Gross Public Debt-total $ billion nominal | Net increase (decrease) | % Increase | |
| 2001 | Bush- 1.1 | 7,320.74 | 240.22 | 3.4% | |
| 2002 | Bush- 1.2 | 7,879.78 | 559.04 | 7.6% | |
| 2003 | Bush- 1.3 | 8,578.76 | 698.98 | 8.9% | |
| 2004 | Bush- 1.4 | 9,331.24 | 752.48 | 8.8% | |
| 2005 | Bush- 2.1 | 9,990.33 | 659.09 | 7.1% | |
| 2006 | Bush- 2.2 | 10,655.37 | 665.04 | 6.7% | |
| 2007 | Bush- 2.3 | 11,355.45 | 700.08 | 6.6% | |
| 2008 | Bush- 2.4 | 12,538.60 | 1,183.15 | 10.4% | |
| 2009 | Obama- 1.1 | 14,559.52 | 2,020.92 | 16.1% | |
| 2010 | Obama- 1.2 | 16,412.91 | 1,853.39 | 12.7% | |
| 2011 | Obama- 1.3 | 18,338.96 | 1,926.05 | 11.7% | |
| 2012 | Obama- 1.4 | 19,459.58 | 1,120.62 | 6.1% |
This is probably easier to see as a chart (thanks to the Heritage Foundation)
http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/increases-us-debt-limit
Now even a cursory glance at this chart tells us that we are in real trouble. The national debt is not only increasing, but the increase is accelerating. This is what physicists call an exponential curve. It looks bad, but how bad is it? To answer that you need to ask another question, "How do we pay the national debt?" The simple answer is that the Gross National Product (GNP) is the sum total of every dollar earned by Americans in a given year. Some portion of this is paid to the federal treasury as taxes and some portion of that is available to pay on the national debt. Now without getting into a lot of math, just imagine what will happen if the debt continues to accelerate in the exponential curve you see above, and the GNP stays about the same or increases only slightly. At some point the debt will get so large that there will not be enough dollars in the GNP to pay the debt. Imagine that every dollar earned by you and all other Americans goes to the government to pay the debt, and there is nothing left over for food, clothing and shelter, and the government won't have any left over either for welfare, food stamps or other services. Obviously, that is not sustainable, and the government would probably have collapsed sometime before that. Goodbye USofA...
At this point the professor states "it is intuitively obvious to the casual observer that...", well I'll let you decide. Are you better off that you were four years ago, and will you be better off in another four years if the same policies are left in place? Will there even be a United States of America for your children and grandchildren in 40 years if these current policies are kept in place? You decide, and vote....
and remember "speed is dangerous, but acceleration kills".
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