Visualizing the U.S. National Debt: 1791-2010

It’s time to update our U.S. national debt history visualization project, bringing it fully up to date through Fiscal Year 2010. First up, the exponential view of both annual GDP and the national debt:

And now, the same data, but shown on a log-lin chart:

Here is another log-lin chart, but this time, showing GDP and the national debt per capita:

Finally, let’s conclude with the U.S. national debt burden, or rather, the debt-to-income ratio for the nation:

Data Sources

• Population 1791-1999
• Population 2000-Present
• U.S. GDP 1791-2009 – Note: the 2010 GDP figure used in the charts above is based on our projection of what it will be for the year based upon already reported quarters.
• National Debt 1791-1849 – Note: Data for 1843 marks shift in date recorded from January 1 to July 1.
• National Debt 1850-1899
• National Debt 1900-1949
• National Debt 1950-1999 – Note: Data spanning 1975 through 1985 rounded to the nearest million.
• National Debt 2000-Present

Notes

The national debt data used in the charts above is for the United States’ total public debt outstanding, which includes the so-called intragovernmental holdings category, which mostly represents where surplus Social Security tax collections have gone since the early 1980s.

Since this category of the national debt must be repaid through tax collections or from the proceeds from the issuance of new debt held directly by the public whenever Social Security runs in the red, as it has begun to do in recent quarters and is projected to do consistently after 2017, we recognize no meaningful difference between the intragovernmental holdings portion of the national debt and the regular debt held by the public.

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