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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (35958)	7/13/2009 8:22:26 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The chart on the bottom mostly indicates that we paid down a lot of the debt from WWII and then after that we went on a spending/debt spree, with some modest interruption in the Clinton/Gingrich/"Peace Dividend" days. We have apparently become less fiscally responsible but that isn't the only explanation for the change. 1 - More and more of our budget is effectively on autopilot with entitlements being a majority of federal spending. 2 - The early post WWII days where from very high (and I believe unprecedented (but I haven't checked out the Civil War era) debt levels, the late part of that pay down was helped by inflating away the debt (certainly the inflation was harmful in a number of ways, and also caused the feds to have to pay higher interest rates, but still the inflation effectively wrote off a lot of the principle).