Noted.
Sorry about that. Thought I was in GD, but that’s no excuse.
Okay, in the (sober) light of day and fresh off my warning, let’s try to keep this factual.
I think an easy way to look at this is look at the public debt at the time Reagan left office. Then look at any surpluses we’ve had since then and see if they exceed the debt at the time he left. If they do, we’ve paid off Reagan’s debt (as well as what came before him, since the debt is like a credit card, the oldest charges are paid first). I can only measure it on 9/30 each year based on this treasury site. As a note, I did not try to adjust any dollars or compare to GDP, these are just the raw figures.
Debt on 9/30/1980 - 907.7B
Debt on 9/30/1988 - 2,602.3B
Total increase in debt - 1,694.6
Now according to the Treasury, the Public Debt has never actually gotten to $0 and in fact hasn’t decreased year-over-year since 1957! However, we have had a few budget surplus years in there, so let’s just assume for the sake of argument that every surplus penny was applied to old debt.
Surpluses in the federal budget since 1988:
1998 - 69.2B
1999 - 125.6B
2000 - 236.4B
2001 - 127.3B
Total - 558.5B
So, as near as I can tell the answer is “No, we haven’t.” If we create another 350B in surplus, then we will start paying down Reagan’s debt.
The following are the figures for the public debt on September 30th of each year from 1994 to 2003. The first dollar figure is the debt not taking account of inflation. The second dollar figure is the debt taking account of inflation and giving the amount in 2011 dollars.
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62 $8,117,758,043,566.01
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16 $7,623,443,911,197.86
09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06 $7,220,798,663,842.20
09/30/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86 $7,255,830,672,573.09
09/30/1999 $5,656,270,901,615.43 $7,476,055,537,429.28
09/30/1998 $5,526,193,008,897.62 $7,465,446,015,700.96
09/30/1997 $5,413,146,011,397.34 $7,426,633,967,038.59
09/30/1996 $5,224,810,939,135.73 $7,332,717,455,689.53
09/29/1995 $4,973,982,900,709.39 $7,186,817,813,229.71
09/30/1994 $4,692,749,910,013.32 $6,972,628,408,805.22
This is the only time in the past several decades that the debt, even in inflation-adjusted figures, has gone down. You can see that the increase in the amount of debt (inflation-adjusted) was slowing down in the mid-1990’s. 2000 was actually less than 1999 (inflation-adjusted), and 2001 was less than 2000 (inflation-adjusted). The debt then took off again in 2002 and later years.
If you think there are mistakes in these numbers, you can politely point them out to me and we can work to correct them. You don’t have to tell me how stupid I am for giving these figures. I don’t need your snide comments.
do you have any evidence that the dollar is or will be worthless?
Worth less-that has been going on for a very long time, but worthless means something different.
Depends whether you think of the debt as a FIFO or LIFO queue.
FIFO - First in, first out - like a corridor all your debt is walking down single file til it leaves, oldest is paid first. We pay off Washington’s debt before Jefferson’s, etc. If it takes another 50 years (to pick a number out of the hat) to pay off Bush II’s debt, does that mean we say “it takes 100 years to pay off Obama” from 2061 to 2161, or do you mean 100 years as in the debt has to be paid by 2111?
LIFO - Last in First Ou, pay most recent debt first - other stuff does not get paid until the most recent stuff is paid. (Your credit card company loves this logic) Like one o those push-down plate servers in a cafeteria. By this logic, George Washinton is the worst president, since his debt will never be paid off.
So which is it, and when does Obama’s clock start ticking?
My question was based on the premise of a FIFO system.
Considering that the debt has been steadily climbing for decades, except maybe during the Clinton years, I doubt any recent president’s debt has been paid off. Clinton may have paid off the post-civil war debt using a FIFO system.
Build 2 stacked bar charts, debt added and debt reduced. For each president, if the federal debt is higher when he finished than when he started, add him to the end of the “debt added” and if lower, the “debt reduced”. Match them up side by side. I suspect you are still paying for Johnson’s Great Society welfare and his Vietnam war.
I don’t believe Clinton set out to restrain the budget; just a combination of a stingy congress and his foresight in “avoiding imperial entanglements”.
Well, since we are $14.7 trillion in debt, wouldn’t you look up the last $14.7 trillion that we have spent and decide that particular spending is not paid for yet?
And, if I had to WAG, I believe that we spend about $3 ish trillion per year, so that would put us around 2006-2007?
There’s a potential problem with that, though. That treats the entire federal budget as debt. That’s saying that every single dime we take in as revenue first goes to pay for yesteryear’s spending.
But perhaps the OP would like to consider only the annual deficit as “unpaid for” and use the revenue to cancel out that same year’s expenditure. Or as much expenditure as it can before being exhausted, that is.
In that case, you wouldn’t use the $3 trillion figure. You’d have to add up surpluses and deficits over the past years until you got to the current $14.7 trillion figure.
As others have said, it depends on how you want to count it. For me, if I had no money in the bank, and $500 worth of credit card debts, I would consider the “spending that I hadn’t paid for yet” to be my last $500 worth of total spending. I suppose that other ways of counting it are equally valid.
Well, that would be the entire history of the country, would it not? Well, actually in the 1830s the national debt was paid off for a short period of time, so I guess we can blame Andrew Jackson! 
But realistically the debt has increased every year since the 1960s so to make any kind of point about a politician in the last 50 years using this method would be an interesting exercise in accounting.
In 2006, they stopped collecting the excise tax originally put in
place to finance the Spanish American War.
link: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/05/treasury-department-drops-court.php