Title: PolitiFact | Was Andrew Jackson the only U.S. president to bring national debt to zero?
Headings: "Andrew Jackson was the last president who actually balanced the federal budget, where we had no national debt."
"Andrew Jackson was the last president who actually balanced the federal budget, where we had no national debt."
Was Andrew Jackson the only U.S. president to bring national debt to zero?
The history
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Content: (Jackson was also deeply skeptical of paper currency, which adds some irony to the current debate over his position on the $20 bill.) In January 1829, the debt was about $58 million. ( Jackson took office that March.) In today’s dollars, that amounts to about $1.4 billion. The total public debt outstanding today is higher by many orders of magnitude: $19.2 trillion. Jackson watched that debt scale down to zero in 1835. According to the Treasury Department, the debt remained close to zero when Jackson left office. But Jackson didn’t have to take much action to make this happen. Since the end of the War of 1812, which racked up a lot of debt, Congress required debt reductions of at least $10 million per year under under Jackson’s two predecessors, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams.