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National Debt Essay

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National Debt Essay
The United States was born in debt. Our nation from the first year in which we were created were in debt. The US started keeping track of our debt since 1790. In 1790 the US started with a 30% debt to Gross Domestic Product, with our actually debt in dollars at around 75 million. During this time period the Continental Congress did not have enough power of the country to tax. The Congress used different methods to try and pay the debt of the new country. One way was printing new currency which didn’t work out. It first tried to pay for stuff by printing money. This currency, known as the Continental, collapsed. The US government then tried borrowing from a lot of different companies.
After the different methods applied by the government the US owed roughly 12 million …show more content…
They succeeded and in the year 1916 the amount of debt the nation had was only about 2.7% of the economy. Then WWI happened. The national debt raised to 25 billion at the time which is a lot more in today's dollars. But again, after the war subsided we got the debt back down to around 9 billion by 1930. A huge point in the US national debt history is our debt limit. This was created and voted on by Congress before WWI. Congress set a limit to how much our government can borrow so we don’t end up borrowing too much. The roaring twenties passed and The Great Depression came into the ball game. The US government changed under FDR’s New Deal concepts. During this time period the debt had its biggest increase. The debt jumped to 40 billion. This may not seem like that much but realize that the economy during this time was non existent. There was no way to pay this enormous amount of money off like there was before. This caused the debt to GDP ratio to jump to 45%, the highest ever. After the government finally started to get its feet under them WWII occurred. This destroyed the debt to GDP ratio. It rose to a whopping
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