What was the national deficit when regan left office?

Answer 1

I can't find the deficit, but here's a graph that shows the U.S. national debt as it was created over time.

At the time Reagan left office, it was right around $4 trillion, or about twice what it was when he took office in 1980.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html

Answer 2

the sad part about it is the tree huggers dont understand that no impact of taxes is immediate and clinton was the unlikely benefactor of the REAGAN tax cuts. reagan proved economically that the optimum tax rate was well below the largest tax rate increase in us history imposed on us by slick willie.

Answer 3

Economy
As Reagan entered office the American economy faced the highest rate of inflation since 1947, and this was considered the nation's principal economic problem. Reagan was considered a small-government conservative and supported income tax cuts, cuts domestic government programs, and deregulation, but no one knew what concrete steps he meant to take, or whether the House, controlled by Democrats, would support him.

Reagan's first official act was to terminate oil price controls, a policy designed to boost America's domestic production and exploration of oil.[10]


Vice President George H.W. Bush, right, meets with President Reagan, left, in Oval Office, 1984.In the summer of 1981 Reagan, backing up a pledge he made when the union threatened to strike, fired a majority of federal air traffic controllers (members of the PATCO union) when they went on an illegal strike. Since this union was one of only two unions to support Reagan in the prior election, this action proved to be a political coup.

A major focus of Reagan's first term was reviving the economy, which was plagued by a new phenomenon known as stagflation (a stagnant economy combined with high inflation). He fought double-digit inflation by supporting Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker's decision to tighten the money supply by dramatically hiking interest rates. While successful at reducing inflation, this plunged the economy into its most severe recession since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate increased from 7.5% when Reagan took office to a peak of 10.8% in late 1982. By mid-1984, however, unemployment was back down to its early-1981 level, and continued to drift downward for the next five years, a period of strong economic growth. During the Reagan presidency, the inflation rate dropped from 13.6% in 1980 (President Carter's final year in office) to 4.1% by 1988, the economy added 16,753,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell from 7.5% to 5.3%. In addition, the poverty rate fell from 14% to 12.8.[11]

Reagan pursued a strategy of combining this tight-money policy with broad tax cuts designed to boost business investment (in Reagan's words: "Chicago school economics, supply-side economics, call it what you will — I noticed that it was even known as Reaganomics at one point until it started working...").[12] Ridiculed by George H.W. Bush as "voodoo," and others as "trickle-down," and "Reaganomics," he managed to push across-the-board tax cuts in 1981, although in 1982 and 1983 he signed tax increases.[13]

Reagan's 1981 income tax cuts, the largest in American history, were passed with bipartisan support by the Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Reagan's support for an increased defense budget also was supported by Congressional Democrats. These Democrats, however, were not so willing to go along with Reagan's proposed cuts in domestic programs. The resulting increase of the national budget deficit led Reagan and Congress to approve tax increases in 1982 and 1983.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 both lowered tax rates and eliminated tax shelters and deductions. For some this caused taxes to go up, for others to go down, but the act was intentionally designed so that it would neither increase nor decrease tax federal revenue compared to previous baselines.

One of the Reagan Administration's cost-cutting moves was abolition of the U.S. Metric Board, established by President Gerald R. Ford, thereby ending the attempt to harmonize U.S. measurements with the majority of first world nations.

Alarmed by the growth in Social Security outlays, Reagan appointed a Social Security reform commission, headed by Alan Greenspan. This commission reached a bipartisan consensus on a two-part plan to slow the growth: raising the Social Security tax base by staged increases in the age required to begin receiving benefits (reflecting rising life expectancy); and increasing government revenues by accelerating a previously enacted (by Ronald Reagan) increase in the rates of social security payroll taxes.

In order to cover the federal budget deficit, the United States borrowed heavily both domestically and abroad, and by the end of Reagan's second term the national debt held by the public rose from 26% of Gross Domestic Product in 1980 to 41% in 1989, the highest level since 1963. By 1988, the debt totaled $2.6 trillion. The country owed more to foreigners than it was owed, and the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to the world's largest debtor nation. [6]

During Reagan's presidency, all economic groups saw their income rise in real terms, including the bottom quintile, whose income rose 6 percent (Bureau of the Census, 1996.) The increases were stronger for the middle class and wealthier Americans, as they benefitted from the growth of the stock market the increasingly high returns of college and post-graduate education. See also: Economic inequality.