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US debt tops 13 trillion dollars for first time

03 June 2010 08:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. US debt has reached 13 trillion dollars for the first time in history, the Treasury Department has said, stoking a political furor over government spending, AFP reported.

Amid vast government outlays designed to end the economic crisis, the debt reached a record 13,050,826,460,886.97 dollars on June 1, according to official figures.

The debt has more than doubled in the last 10 years and now stands at just under 90 percent of annual gross domestic product. Against this backdrop, steaming the flow of red ink has become a contentious political issue in Washington, with Democrats and Republicans trading barbs about who is to blame.

Earlier on Wednesday President Obama assailed Republicans for leaving him with the type of spiraling short-term deficits that fuel longer-term debt. The US government suffered its 19th consecutive month of budget deficit in April.

"By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over one trillion dollars and projected deficits of eight trillion dollars over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthy, and a worthy but expensive prescription drug program that wasn’t paid for," Obama told an audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Despite all their current moralizing about the need to curb spending, this is the same crowd who took the record 237 billion dollar surplus that president Clinton left them and turned it into a record 1.3 trillion dollar deficit.

But Republicans have lambasted Obama for expanding government spending since he came to office through a massive reform of healthcare. The debt has risen by around 2.4 trillion dollars since Obama took office in January 2009 and rose 4.9 trillion dollars in the eight years George W. Bush spent in office.