How Big Is The National Debt And Describe Its History?

            According to the article Congressional Budget Office in The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2010 to 2020, the reason for this overwhelming increase in debt is because of three factors : the obvious difference between federal revenues and spending done even before the impact of recession caused this

The amount of money that the United States government owes as of October 17, 2004 at 03:48:52 pm GMT was $7,435,016,998.21. The debt has increased by an average of $1.7 billion per day since September 30, 2003! From a more individual perspective, currently the United States population is roughly around

Many believe the country's dramatic decent into debt began with a choice, not a crisis. In January of 2001, with the budget balanced, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast that the nation would have over a $2 trillion dollar surplus by 2010, enough money to pay off the entire national debt. In the years following 2001 political leaders chose to cut taxes, increase spending, and wage two wars solely with borrowed funds (Montgomery, 2011). Today the national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Federal debt has been increasing for at least the past ten years. Currently, federal debt is $19,929,184,161,352.13 (Chantrill). The national debt has nearly doubled throughout Obama’s presidency and President elect Trump’s ideas do not look promising for change. It is estimated that Trump’s tax cuts will raise federal debt by $7.2 trillion within the next decade (Mauro). Many debt crises have occurred because of declines in growth. When

Since the nation’s very beginning, it has carried a debt from the American Revolution. Only once in the entire U.S. history has been the debt zero, during President Andrew Jackson’s administration in the 1830’s. President Jackson set a budget like the other future and past presidents, but actually stayed within its parameters. However, the debt kept growing after his presidency and reached $18 trillion dollars today. The world has changed a lot since the 1830’s, the methods used during that period can no longer be the solution in 2015 because there are just too many factors that must be considered. The size and the population of the country have changed dramatically, foreign relationships are far more complicated and broader, and people’s expectations of the government are different.

The United States national debt is large. The U.S. Debt-to-GDP ratio has grown to over 60 percent in recent years. We are more than $15 trillion in debt. In this paper I will address the federal budget, the United States debt, and the resulting impacts on society in several sectors.

In 2009 the debt was amounted to about $12 trillion , or 83.4 percent of the country’s GDP (“Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2011” table 7.1). Since 2003, the debt has been increasing by more than $500 billion annually. The increase in 2009 was $1.9 trillion. According to the Congressional Budgeting Office, this debt will keep increasing at least for the next decade (“The Budget and Economic Outlook : Fiscal Years 2010 to 2020” 21).

Segal (2010) points out that America has not had a balanced budget since 2001. In 2008 the US national debt held by foreign holdings was at 48%, while the public debt was at $5,461 billion (Segal, 2010; National priorities org, 2014). The national debt last reported was on October 2013 and had reached 17 trillion dollars, the same amount as the debt ceiling (National priorities Project, 2013).

The total United States national debt is now over 19 trillion dollars and our Congressional leadership shows no signs of accomplishing any significant changes to make the situation better. That 19 trillion equates to almost $59,000 for every citizen of the United Sates. Sound financial practice is to not spend more money than you earn and borrow only for emergencies. It appears our Congress is incapable of adhering to sound financial practices as in the last fifty years there have only been five years when the U.S. recorded a budget surplus. Between 2009 and 2012 the U.S. added 5.5 trillion dollars to its national debt.

With all this debt, it begs to question. To who and what does the United States owe all this money? According to the “National Priorities Project”, 34 percent of the debt is owned by foreign countries, like China and Japan, 28 percent by federal accounts, and the remaining 38 percent is owned by other investors or local governments. Ever since the United States was founded, it owed money to the foreign investors and it has only continued to pile up.

The United States deficit contributes to its debt and the debt contributes to the deficit. We know the longest running uninterrupted surplus for the Unites States was from 1920 to 1930 but spent most of it combating the war. This will show how the U.S. deficits, debt, and surplus affect the following areas; the taxpayers, future social security and Medicare users, unemployed individuals, University of Phoenix students, The United States financial reputation on an international level, a domestic automobile manufacturer (exporter), and a Italian clothing company (importer).

The U.S national debt is 19 trillion dollars. This debt has been growing since the Financial crisis in 2007. As

The brainchild behind the national debt was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Hamilton saw the national debt as a way to absorb the debts incurred by the individual states during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton also saw it as a device to create capital for the new nations growing industries. In early 1781

He started with a debt of $10.6 trillion and the current debt is $15.3 trillion. A lot of that comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. Bush accumulated debt faster than the presidents before him and Obama is continuing the trend. Of course, the president isn’t solely responsible for the debt but it proves a good way to organize.

The National Debt consists of the total debt accrued by local, state and federal. Public debt is essentially the federal debt, thus compiling the staggering number that already exists. The debt deficit to me is astonishing. Currently, the total public debt in the United States, as of December 16, 2015, is $18,788,138,221,346.49. This includes $13,600,726,418,253.26 debt held by the public and $5,187,411,803,093.23 by intergovernmental holdings (usgovermentdebt, 2015). High GPD is not anything new to the United States. The all-time high was 121.70 percent ($18827323.00) in 1946 and a record low of 31.70 ($253400.00) percent in 1974 (United States Government Debt to GDP, 2015). The way we are spending, and the debt we are accruing, it would