phillipk_1959 asked:
Clinton was the last one toe reduce the “Debt Owed to The Public. Fun I thought SSI was owed to the public.
Add a link here 1
Clinton was the last one toe reduce the “Debt Owed to The Public. Fun I thought SSI was owed to the public.
Add a link here 1
#1 by Runtun - January 1st, 2010 at 18:39
Since it was next to nothing in 1970, I am going to guess Nixon eliminated, then reinstated the national debt. But an educated guess would be Kennedy.
#2 by froghugger - January 4th, 2010 at 19:55
no that’s not true. Clinton had a surplus on his budget but the debt still went up. two different things.
#3 by A Republicrat - January 6th, 2010 at 00:12
Andrew Jackson
On January 1, 1835, the United States paid off entirely its longstanding public debt. For that year and the next the nation enjoyed debt-freedom, the only two years in its entire history when it held no obligation to creditors. For this reason the years 1835-1836 are unique and significant, but, oddly enough, historians of Jacksonian America have overlooked what this financial circumstance and its anticipation meant to the era. This historiographical oversight is particularly striking because the Jacksonians themselves and their opponents made much of the extraordinary financial situation which materialized during Andrew Jackson’s second term. National debt-freedom was, in fact, a core element of what is commonly called Jacksonian Democracy.
The elimination of the national debt caught nobody by surprise on New Year’s Day, 1835. It had been anticipated for a decade. In December, 1824, in his last annual message to Congress, retiring President James Monroe had announced that, barring any unforeseen emergency, the public debt would be extinguished on that date. Congress had, in fact, been working toward debt elimination ever since the Treaty of Ghent and, after 1824, aggressively adhered to Monroe’s timetable, refinancing debt whenever it could and making sure that the Sinking Fund Commission had the resources to meet interest and principal payments on time. The second Bank of the United States made the actual disbursements to creditors. Consensus, it seemed, existed regarding the need to eliminate the debt. However, when President John Quincy Adams presented Congress in December, 1825, an agenda for road and canal construction, a national university, an astronomical institute, and other federal initiatives—an agenda without cost estimates, timelines, and other fiscal data—he raised the suspicion that he was not committed to debt elimination according to Monroe’s schedule, and this suspicion helped cripple his administration.
#4 by Big Daddy - January 8th, 2010 at 08:54
The United States has, at times, had public debt since its inception. Debts incurred during the American Revolutionary War and under the Articles of Confederation led to the first yearly reported value of $75,463,476.52 on January 1, 1791. Over the following 45 years, the debt grew, briefly contracted to zero on January 8, 1835 under President Andrew Jackson but then quickly grew into the millions again.[9]
The first dramatic growth spurt of the debt occurred because of the Civil War. The debt was just $65 million in 1860, but passed $1 billion in 1863 and had reached $2.7 billion following the war. The debt slowly fluctuated for the rest of the century, finally growing steadily in the 1910s and early 1920s to roughly $22 billion as the country paid for involvement in World War I.[9]
The buildup and involvement in World War II brought the debt up another order of magnitude from $51 billion in 1940 to $260 billion following the war. After this period, the debt’s growth closely matched the rate of inflation until the 1980s, when it again began to increase rapidly. The debt quadrupled during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, declined slightly during the Clinton presidency, and more recently the debt doubled during the George W. Bush presidency, and is projected to double again under the Obama presidency to a level numerically equal to GDP.
#5 by ggraves1724 - January 8th, 2010 at 22:50
Can’t answer any better than some already have, but no one mentioned the fact that JFK wanted to start paying down the National Debt (not deficit) in the early part of the 1960’s, however it was to a point that paying it down made no sense as it would hurt our own economy and we really couldn’t afford it… And if you ask this old man: Nixon mortgaged the United States in the early 70’s to a point where the only way to manage the National Debt is to merely sustain it by paying something akin to interest only payments. One way to look at it is: If we were to pay off the National Debt we probably would have to give up Alaska:) Just my opinion.