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A typographical error in last Sunday's column made me look like more of a fool than former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, and she believes that dolphins listen to angels. She has claimed that the national debt went down during the Reagan presidency.
Somewhere along the line, my comma became a period in print, thus wiping out trillions in debt. Ah, if it were only so easy.
There are several definitions of the national debt, but
the most common is what the Treasury Department calls the
gross national debt,
and these numbers come from the
U.S. Treasury web site and the 2002 edition of the
Statistical Abstract of the United States.
On Sept. 30, 1981, after the Reagan administration had been in office for a few months, it stood at $909 billion. Eight years later, despite the Reagan campaign promises, the gross federal debt had grown to $2.87 trillion.
That's an increase of $1.87 trillion. To put this another way, during eight years of relative peace and prosperity, the federal debt grew more than it did during the preceding 200 years of revolution, civil war, many minor wars, two world wars and the conquest of a continent.
After the next four years of the regime of George Bush the Elder, the debt had grown to $4.35 trillion, an increase of $1.48 trillion. His administration alone borrowed more money than all the previous administrations, except Reagan's, put together.
You could write a decent history of the United States just by writing a history of the national debt. It led to political divisions as soon as the country got started.
President George Washington's cabinet had two brilliant men who couldn't agree on much of anything. One was Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury; the other was Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state.
Hamilton was a Federalist. He wanted a strong central
government and didn't like states. He was suspicious of
democracy: The people are turbulent and changing; they
seldom judge to determine right.
He persuaded the federal government to assume debts from
the Revolutionary War, rightly believing that this would
make a stronger central government. Since the government's
bonds would be held by the moneyed class, this would give
the rich a stake in the success of the new government. A
national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a
national blessing,
he declared.
Jefferson agreed with Hamilton that a national debt meant a strong central government aligned with commercial interests. But that is not what Jefferson wanted. While president, he labored to reduce the debt.
As he explained in a letter, the principle of
spending money to be paid by posterity ... is but swindling
on a large scale.
Jefferson's political organization was known as the Republican Party, which over the years became the Democratic-Republican Party and eventually, the Democratic Party. Hamilton's Federalists withered away -- but the national debt remained.
To return to recent times, the annual federal budget began to run at a surplus during Bill Clinton's administration, but the accumulated deficit still grew by $1.42 trillion to reach $5.77 trillion on Sept. 30, 2001.
The 2000 Republican platform stated that we are also
determined to protect Medicare and to pay down the national
debt. Reducing that debt is both a sound policy goal and a
moral imperative.
The Republicans won the White House, maintained control of the House of the Representatives, and have controlled the Senate since 2003. So if their word means anything, especially when it comes to moral imperatives, the debt should be decreasing.
But it continues to grow, and the Bush budgets contain record annual deficits, like $521 billion for this fiscal year. That is the approximate amount of the accumulated gross federal debt in 1976. Bush the Younger will borrow more in one year than the federal government borrowed in its first two centuries.
However, he can probably find a speechwriter to spin these numbers away, perhaps by using the Noonan method: a flat-out lie.
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