From the Los Angeles Times's David Lauter:
1. The U.S. debt burden is starting to decline. That’s right – it’s going down, not up. ... Economists measure the debt relative to the total size of the gross domestic product. By that measure, the debt grew rapidly during most of President George W. Bush’s tenure and President Obama’s first term as the government borrowed money to fight two wars and the deepest recession in more than half a century. But the rapid growth ended more than a year ago.
Nothing new
2. China holds only a relatively small fraction of U.S. debt. ... Just about one-third of the debt is owned by people and institutions in other countries, of which the largest single holder is China, which has, at last count, about $1.3 trillion in U.S. treasury securities, or about 7.8% of the U.S. outstanding debt.
3. The U.S. has had a national debt for almost its entire history. ... The federal government has been without a debt for only one year in U.S. history, during parts of 1835 and 1836. As a percentage of the GDP, the debt peaked at the end of World War II. Notably, the dollar value of the debt increased through the 1950s and 1960s, but because of rapid economic growth, the debt fell dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
4. Debt crises have marked American politics from the beginning. ... One of the biggest political fights of the George Washington administration involved the national debt. Alexander Hamilton successfully pushed a plan under which the new federal government would assume the debts that the states had incurred during the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fought the idea. In the end, the two sides reached a compromise under which Congress approved the debt plan and Hamilton backed the idea of placing the new nation’s capital on the banks of the Potomac River, rather than in Philadelphia.
