Per capita and inflation adjusted numbers don’t tell the whole and accurate story. The percentages, however, do. People really don’t care what the actual numbers are, just how much the changes have been. Besides, no one has accurate inflationary figures to adjust dollar figures by. So, if $1 was spent in 1791 what, excatly, would that number be for 2011? No one really knows.
I find it best to leave all numbers as they were originally reported and let the reader determine what the numbers mean to them. One thing our government does is play loose with number using “seasonally adjusted” or “adjusted for inflation” or “per capita” numbers. They are meaningless as they have no concrete basis, so people do not trust them. Real numbers as reported tend to have more meaning.
Per capita and inflation adjusted numbers don’t tell the whole and accurate story. The percentages, however, do. People really don’t care what the actual numbers are, just how much the changes have been. I respectfully disagree because just going for the shock value of "Look how much the debt has grown since the 1700's" will bring the counter-argument one second later of, "Of course it has grown by a huge percent. The population has grown by a huge percent.".
It costs far less money to run a country of 4 million (the U.S. in 1790) than it costs to run a country of 308 million (the U.S. in 2010).
When a population has tremendous growth over time, even if the per capita debt is kept constant with impeccable financial conservatism, the total debt chart would be a mirror image of the population growth chart:
