The chart of the day...

...is from an article in the New York Times, "Federal Budget Deficit Falls to Smallest Level Since 2008." (I couldn't get the original to appear with numbers so I posted the one above instead.) From the story (my emphasis):

Closing the books on a fiscal year in which the federal budget deficit fell more sharply than in any year since the end of World War II, the Treasury Department reported on Thursday that the deficit for 2013 dropped to $680 billion, from about $1.1 trillion the previous year.

In nominal terms, that is the smallest deficit since 2008, and signals the end of a five-year stretch beginning with the onset of the recession when the country’s fiscal gap came in at more than $1 trillion each year. As a share of the nation’s economy, the budget deficit fell to about 4.1 percent, from a high of more than 10 percent during the depths of the Great Recession.

In other words, if you made $100,000 a year and had a credit card bill of $4,100, that wouldn't be a "crushing debt burden," wouldn't it? Remember that next time you hear some Republican go on about "runaway federal deficits."