History of U.S. national debt

November 21, 2007 11:20 AM

Can anyone help my find a chart or data that shows U.S. national debt as a function of time, especially with correlation to presidential administrations?

I've looked but it's like trying to find a needle in a hay stack on Google. If I could find national debt by year (at least for the 20 Century), I could do the rest. Thanks. No, it's not for a homework assignment; I'm too old for that sh1t.

posted by Doohickie to law & government (9 comments total)

I did a quick google search, isn't this what you're looking for?

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Do remember that until 1971, we were not a debtor nation. I'd like to say that it's all Nixon's fault for taking us off the gold standard, but that's probably not it.

I might have misunderstood --- there's the national debt and there's also the defecit. The federal defecit runs year to year, and historically is a lot more prevelant than the national debt. Roosevelt ran huge defecits, but becuase our trade balance overseas was in better shape, I don't think we had a national debt in WWII despite the huge defecits.

Does that help? Or am I just patting myself on the back?
posted by skybolt at 11:24 AM on November 21, 2007

The lower, smaller graph, not the larger, first graph. Sorry!
posted by skybolt at 11:26 AM on November 21, 2007

This page has a good discussion and set of graphs, as does this one.
posted by thewittyname at 11:40 AM on November 21, 2007

Here's another one.
posted by yeti at 11:43 AM on November 21, 2007

Hmmmm... those aren't quite reinforcing my memory, but that may be the data I'm looking for.

What I remember was that someone I worked with had a chart that showed.... national debt? budget deficit? maybe some other parameter? Something to that effect, as a function of time, with presidencies shown, and the point of the chart was that the debt/deficit/whatever it was was more the black when Democrats were in office, and more to the red when Republicans were. I saw the chart during the Clinton years. Maybe the only exception the rule was Roosevelt, for obvious reasons.

The thing I took away from the chart was that it kind turned the notion that Democrats were big spenders while Republicans were fiscally responsible on its ear.
posted by Doohickie at 12:41 PM on November 21, 2007

Perhaps this, or this (although the second link does not include G.W Bush's term)? This is another chart, but it shows the annual deficit, not the debt.
posted by thewittyname at 12:54 PM on November 21, 2007

If the purpose of the graph was to show/prove that "trend" then it was likely formed from non-typical statistics in order to make the conclusion appear a certain way. If that is the theme you want to convey, you will have to find _that_ graph or one pulled from similarly limited statistics. You will have a difficult time pulling that conclusion out of mainstream indicators of spendiness and thrift.
posted by milqman at 1:28 PM on November 21, 2007

Go to the source. The US Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt's Monthly Statement of the Public Debt and Downloadable Files, 1959 to the present.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 5:20 PM on November 21, 2007

No graph, but a blog post I did a couple of years ago noted the annual debt level (and its percentage increase from the previous year) for 1981-2005.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 5:23 PM on November 21, 2007