Pushing the Incalculable into the Past

If you leave out the debt that you don't know how to adjust for inflation -- like all the Federal debt from before 1947 -- your graph looks like this

Graph #1: From mine of 22 March 2015

If you find data that goes deeper into the past, so far back that the stuff you cannot adjust for inflation is 150 years distant, then the same graph looks like this:

Graph #2: Data subset from mine of 29 March 2015

I think Graph #2 is the better graph.

Hey, if you take nominal as a percent of real, blue as a percent of red on Graph #2, you can see the effect of inflation on debt:

Graph #3: Relation of the two lines on Graph #2