I did a little checking:—

Ronald Reagan left us a national debt of about $3.5 trillion or $3,500 billion.

The national debt when Ronald Reagan took office was about $1 trillion. That included all the debt run up during the Revolutionary war, the Spanish-American war, the Civil war, World War I, World War II, the Korean war, and the Vietnam war. In other words it took the United States from 1776 until 1980 or more than 200 years to accumulate a national debt of $1 trillion.

It took Reaganomics only eight years to increase the national debt from $1 trillion to about $3.5 trillion!

[While cutting social programs, incidentally. Any amount that social programs begun in the 1930s by FDR and subsequent years (e.g., LBJ's "War on Poverty") added to this deficit was minuscule, and complaining bitterly about "entitlements" the way Reagan and other conservatives did (and do) is like a person running up hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and then complaining that being asked to put an occasional dollar in the poor box is the cause of their financial troubles]

Given the spending habits established by the legacy of Ronald Reagan and resumed (after Clinton balanced the budget) by his disciple, George W. Bush, the national debt is now about $5.5 trillion!

The interest costs alone on the national debt now run about $250 million a year! When Ronald Reagan took office, they were about $53 million a year.

A true American hero.

Don Firth