Part one of term paper
"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 ...

Part two of term paper
... 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 Worl ...