...to the penny

In the fascinating yet scary department, here are some Treasury department numbers regarding US national debt:

As of yesterday:
11/09/2005 $8,034,610,660,541.64

That's over 8 trillion dollars. I find it difficult to count all those commas, myself.

I started looking at this data because I read a blog article claiming that the GWB administration had borrowed more money than all 42 previous administrations combined, and I thought that that couldn't possibly be correct. Well, it looks like it isn't.

Historical data:
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/29/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86
09/29/1995 $4,973,982,900,709.39
09/28/1990 $3,233,313,451,777.25

12/31/1985 $1,945,941,616,459.88
12/31/1980 $930,210,000,000.00
12/31/1975 $576,649,000,000.00
12/31/1970 $389,158,403,690.26
12/31/1965 $320,904,110,042.04
12/30/1960 $290,216,815,241.68
12/30/1955 $280,768,553,188.96

Since 2000, we've only borrowed about 2.5 trillion dollars, and we already had over 5 trillion dollars of debt before that. So, there's been a 50% increase, not a 100% increase, over the past six years. Of course, we still have two years to go.