Cutting The National Debt

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Term Paper Title	Cutting The National Debt
# of Words	1416
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.66

Cutting the National Debt

Cutting the National Debt

        "It's time to clean up this mess."  Famous last words heard from the
mouths of many different politicians when talking about the national debt and
the budget deficit. Our debt is currently $4.41 trillion and we have a budget
deficit of around $300 billion and growing.  Our government now estimates that
by the year 2002 the debt will be $6.507 Trillion. While our politicians talk of
balancing the budget , not one of them has proposed a feasible plan to start
paying down the debt.
     In the early days of our government debt was considered to be a last
resort.  In 1790, when Alexander Hamilton, as secretary of the Treasury, made
his first report on the national debt of the United States, he estimated it at
close to $70 million. After alternately rising and falling, the debt stood at
only $4 million, or 21 cents per capita, in 1840. That was the lowest point ever
reached by the public debt of the U.S. After 1840 it rose to a peak, in the last
year of the Civil War, of almost $2.68 billion and a per capita figure of $75.01.
The only justification for debt of any significant amount was a war.  By 1900
this had been reduced to under $1 Billion. By 1919, the end of World War I, the
debt had climbed to $25.5 Billion. In each of the following years the debt was
reduced, and by 1930 stood at $18.1 Billion. With the collapse of Wall Street in
1929, the country
    (debt history: 1850 to 1950) fell into the Great Depression, which lasted
until 1940. At that time the debt had climbed to $51 Billion. By the end of
World War II the debt was $269 Billion.
     Again the government worked to reduce the debt, and by 1949 it was
$252.7 Billion. At that point the Korean War started, sending the debt to $274
Billion by 1955. Since then, there has been no serious effort to pay down the
debt. The main point to be made was that on three separate occasions a major
debt reduction effort had been made, but  in the past 55 years in spite of much
arm-waving there have been no similar results.
     The U.S. debt is divided into two major kinds of loans, marketable and
nonmarketable. The former provides about 52 percent of the total and is made up
of bills, notes, and bonds that can be traded; the latter includes U.S. savings
bonds, foreign-government-owned securities, and government account securities
that are redeemable but not tradable. Maturity of this debt ranges from less
than a year to over 20 years, with the average maturity a...

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