Our current national debt, as of November 17, is $7,443,751,916,595.72.
There will be about 131 million individual tax returns filed in 2004. If you are one of those filers, your share of the debt is about $57,000.
While $7.4 trillion in debt may seem like a lot, the keepers of the national credit card have decided to increase the limit by an additional $800 billion. The GOP will now have the ability to borrow up to $8.2 billion. You can be sure that they will borrow every penny of it. After all, it is you and not just them who have to pay that money back, with interest.
President Bush was pleased to receive the news that his credit limit has increased:
The White House issued a statement saying the president planned to sign the bill, calling it "important to protect the full faith and credit" of the U.S.
It took us 190 years (1791-1981) and thirty-nine Presidents to accumulate our first trillion dollars of debt.
It took Ronald Reagan's administration only four years to double the debt to $2 trillion dollars. By the end of the Reagan years (September 1988 actually), our debt stood at $2.6 trillion, about two thirds of which had accumulated in Reagan's eight years.
George Herbert Walker Bush kept on borrowing. In only four years, his administration ran up an additional $1.4 trillion of debt. Late in the Bush I term (September 1992), we reached the four trillion dollar mark.
In the twelve years of Reagan and Bush I, we quadrupled the national debt.
The national debt continued to increase under Bill Clinton but the rate of increase slowed greatly. Measuring from September 30, 1992 through September 30, 2000, the following yearly amounts were added to the debt (figures in billions):
1993 $3471994 $281
1995 $281
1996 $251
1997 $189
1998 $113
1999 $130
2000 $18
On the eve of George W. Bush's inaugural, the debt was $5.7 trillion. With the Congress raising the debt limit to $8.2 trillion, George W, Bush will soon have borrowed $2.5 trillion on your tab. Kash at Angry Bear notes that the increase in the debt limit will be sufficient for only two years.
Last year we added $596 billion to the national debt. For purposes of comparison, the cummulative debt from 1791 through 1975 was $576 billion.
There really is no end in sight. Howard Dean is fond of saying that "You can't trust Republicans with money..."
The history of the national debt suggests that he is right.