Title: The Long Story of U.S. Debt, From 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart - The Atlantic
Headings: The Long Story of U.S. Debt, From 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart
Business
The Long Story of U.S. Debt, From 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart
FREEDOM ISN'T FREE
CIVIL WAR
IN THE TRENCHES
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
WORLD WAR II
REAGONOMICS
W.
THE GREAT RECESSION
THE ROAD TO $16 TRILLION

Content: The debt would never get below $900 million again. But a surge of late-19th-century economic growth, with a bit of inflation, helped the US gradually reduce the the Civil War debt as a percentage of economic output. IN THE TRENCHES
Again, from a GDP perspective, the US was virtually debt-free before sending the doughboys to France. In 1916, as a share of the economy the debt accounted for just 2.7% . The surge in debt associated with World War I was financed largely by selling bonds to the US public. ( By the time the US entered the war, pretty much all the other major powers were already in it up to  their necks, and thus, didn't have any money to lend.) In the aftermath of the war, the Uncle Sam hit a new record high debt-to-GDP of about 33%, with more than $25 billion in debts, or about $334 billion in today's dollars. But with a combination of budget surpluses, expenditures aimed explicitly at paying off debt early, and payments from the losers of war, the US made significant progress in whittling the debt down. It fell by more than $9 billion by 1930, a reduction of more than a third. This period coincided with a period of Republican dominance in the US, in which taxes were cut repeatedly from high wartime levels.