Below is a list of every year from the ratification of US Constitution until the present year. I changed the font from a 10.5 point to a 10 point font for the years when the US Feddle Gummint was debt free. (I had to paste it as a picture for it to work.)
See if you can find and list all the years in smaller font representing freedom from debt.
Here is a picture of a beautiful Piper Aerostar to ponder while I wait for my readers to find all those years:
Well, did you figure it out yet? Let me give you some hints. Here is a chart I made from FED data.
It seems to go from around zero in the 18th century to infinity and beyond, to quote Buzz Lightyear. Not really much help. The vertical scale for the first 150 years is too small.
How about this one? Same data with a vertical log scale.
Can you see it now, that big dip in the mid-1830s? Ackchyually, you’ve been punked. There was only 1 year where the Feddle Gummint debt was considered paid off; 1835.
From Doug Casey's International Man Newsletter:
International Man: It's hard to believe the US government was ever debt-free.
But it happened once—in 1835—thanks to President Andrew Jackson. He was the first and only president to completely pay off the national debt.
Jackson also shut down the Second Bank of the United States, the precursor to the Federal Reserve, the US's current iteration of a central bank.
It's unthinkable a modern US president could or would do such things.
Given the practical reality of the world today, where do you see the federal debt going, and what are the implications?
Doug Casey: It was wonderful that Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt, something that Alexander Hamilton, with his warped ideas of economics, sold to the country. But it's now absolutely impossible to pay off $32 trillion of acknowledged debt, scores of trillions of contingent liabilities, and scores of trillions more of unacknowledged debt.
So, I ask you again, is the feddle gummint debt a bug or a feature?
Seems like a feature to me.