National debt soars by 500 billion dollars in less than a month!

Financial bailout plan the primary culprit in record-setting debt accumulation.

NEW YORK - November 1, 2008 - It’s the surge you won’t hear anyone boast about.
Never before in U.S. history has the national debt increased as much and as rapidly as it has over the past month.

Since September 30, the day the national debt hit the $10-trillion mark for the first time, the government has run up over $500 billion in new debt.

That’s more than the federal deficit for the entire 2008 fiscal year, which ended September 30. And it’s the most rapid increase in the national debt ever: over half a trillion dollars in less than a month - 23 days to be exact.

The government’s latest calculation of the national debt stands at $10,530,893,033,778.21 - that’s $10.5-trillion for short. It took less than four months for it to rocket to that level from $9.5 trillion on July 21.

Less than four months! To put it in perspective, consider this: it took the U.S. government over four decades, from 1940 to 1982, to run up its first trillion dollars of debt.

The second and third trillions were racked up much more quickly - each in just four years. And it only took from 1990 to 1992 for the national debt to hit $4 trillion.

On the day President Bush was sworn in, the debt stood at $5.7 trillion. Less than eight years later, it’s within days of having swelled to $10.5 trillion dollars on his watch - an embarrassing milestone for a president who considers himself a conservative and an advocate of fiscal discipline.