Erase Debt

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Admin
Erase Debt

Erase Debt

History of the National Debt

The American Federal Government is heavily in debt. This is, of course, nothing even vaguely new or newsworthy; indeed, the United States of America has had a public debt of some sort since its inception as a nation, having incurred great expenses as a result of the logistical costs of the American War for Independence. And while there were not infrequent and often protracted periods of national surpluses during the first 150 years or so of the United States government, the modern national debt has been growing since the 1930s, after the most recent long string of national surpluses (following the First World War, the US government experienced 11 consecutive surpluses and reduced the national debt of $25.5 billion by as much as 36%) failed to offset the cost of the Second World War and the new federal programs of FDR’s New Deal. During the 1930s and 1940s, the national debt increased exponentially, rising from $16 billion in 1930 to $260 billion in 1950.

In recent decades, the national debt has experienced similar “growth.” By 1980, the government was in the red to the tune of $909 billion; by the end of the Reagan/Bush I years in office (1981-1993), that figure had quadrupled. That figure, somewhere in the nexus of $3 trillion, would fluctuate little during the 1990s, and when Clinton left office in January 2001, the national debt was around $3.4 trillion. It was during the subsequent decade and the presidency of Bush II that the debt resumed the “upward” trend experienced under the previous Republican Administrations: by December 2008, the national debt was $10.7 trillion. Since the swearing in of President Obama on 20 January 2009, that figure has further increased to the present day $14.2 trillion.

Seen in this light, it is clear that in the history of the United States government there has been no one “correct” political or economic philosophy in regards to reducing the national debt. The liberal Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman and Johnson all saw spikes in the important ratio of the size of the national debt to the size of national economy, as did the conservative Administrations of Bush I, Reagan and Bush II. Of course, while witnessing the ongoing Congressional battle over spending, this would be a simple phenomenon to miss, as Speaker of the House Republican John A. Boehner of Ohio and likeminded Congressional Republicans (including the ambitious Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin) have been insistent that the primary cause of the increasing debt is a an excess of federal programs, and the only real way to reduce the debt is to cut or otherwise wholly defund such programs.