I Thought Interest Was At A Record High

Every year someone says the same thing: the debt is out of control, we are drowning, the children will pay.

I went and looked. The debt is real. But the story people tell about it has the shape wrong, and I got it wrong too before I looked at my own chart.

The Debt Is Big, And It Has Been Bigger

Government debt is 56.6 out of every 100 pesos the country produces in a year.

That went up a lot. In 2019 it was 37.0. So the pandemic added 19.6 to it. We borrowed to get through, like most countries did.

But here is what nobody mentions. In 1993 it was 73.9.

So we have been here before, and worse. That does not make today fine. It does mean "worst ever" is not true.

Where I Was Wrong

I want to show you a mistake, because it is a good one.

I found that 15.3 out of every 100 pesos the government spends goes on interest. Paying for old borrowing, before a single classroom or clinic gets anything.

That felt shocking. I wrote it up as a record high. It fit the story everyone tells.

Then I drew the chart and looked at it.

In 1990 that number was 39.4. Almost two pesos in every five.

It fell for thirty years. It bottomed at 10.8 in 2020. Now it is climbing again.

Today's 15.3 is lower than 21 of the 28 years I have data for. It sits in the bottom half.

So the true story is not "worst ever". It is "much better than it was, and now going the wrong way". That is less exciting. It is also what happened.

I only caught it because I made a picture and stared at it. Reading my own numbers was not enough.

Not Spending Too Much. Collecting Too Little.

Here is the part that changed my mind about something.

The government spends 16.88 out of every 100 pesos the country makes. For a country, that is not a lot. Plenty of places spend far more.

It collects 16.69. Tax alone is 14.37.

The hole is 5.68 pesos in every 100.

So when people say the government spends too much, the numbers do not really back that. The spending is modest. The collecting is what does not keep up.

Two Governments, Two Answers

One more thing that confused me for a while.

You will see two different numbers for the same country in the same year, and both are right.

It depends on what you count as "the government". One way counts only the national offices. The other adds in city and town governments and the pension funds.

For 2024, the narrow way says the government collected 16.69 out of every 100 pesos. The wide way says 21.16.

Same country. Same year. Different fence around it.

So I labelled every number with which fence it uses, and I never mix them or average them. Averaging two correct numbers gives you a wrong one.

What I Could Not Get

The budget by department. By region. How much for schools, how much for roads. Who we owe the money to.

All of that exists. It is published as huge documents meant for people to read, not for programs to read. And one of the government sites turns programs away entirely.

So I left all of it out, and wrote down where you would go to find it.

You will also notice I never give you "the national budget" as one big peso number. That figure is what was approved, not what was spent. They are different, and mixing them up is how you end up saying something untrue with a very confident number.