last time us paid off debt
Because the government knows just how it can pay off the debtâand it is the craftiest, yet oldest, trick in the book. Make no mistake: The national debt is soaring. The last time the federal government actually paid off some of its debt was 1960. Even then, it paid less than $1 billion of the over $291 billion it owed at the time. The debt has soared so much that the $1 trillion in federal debt that President Ronald Reagan declared âincomprehensibleâ in 1981 when elected to office has grown 800 percent, to more than $8 trillion today.