You can make dent in $14 trillion debt

When your credit card hits its $2,000 limit, the credit card company generally responds not with a firm letter telling you to stop spending more money than you make, but with a generous offer to raise your credit limit. Our government has gotten that same courtesy for centuries and now is approaching its current $14.3 trillion ceiling.

Our Founding Fathers might understand. As entrepreneurial types often do, they started their new venture in debt. On Jan. 1, 1783, our public debt was a hefty $43 million, much of which was borrowed from France and the Netherlands.

“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing,” predicted Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the treasury. During the next 228 years (aside from 1835, when the Andrew Jackson administration paid off all our national debt), we've increased the debt, mostly to pay for wars and emergencies.

The public debt jumped from $45.2 million to $119.2 million to fund the War of 1812. When Illinois' Abraham Lincoln took office, the debt was $64.8 million, slightly larger than the annual federal budget at the time. By the end of the Civil War, our debt was $2.2 billion. By the end of World War I, it was $25 billion. After the Depression, our debt was $50.7 billion. After World War II, it was $250 billion. Wars in Korea, Vietnam and against poverty and drugs put us deeper in debt. We tripled our debt during the 1980s, blasting through the $1 trillion ceiling to top $3 trillion by 1990. Our debt rose past $5 trillion by 2000, hit $10 trillion by 2008, and now tops $14 trillion.

But the U.S. Treasury Department offers a solution. We the people can pay it off. “Welcome to the United States Treasury's site for making donations to help reduce the public debt. If you would like to make a donation, please fill in the required fields and click the Submit Data button when completed,” reads the welcome at www.pay.gov/paygov/forms/formInstance.html?agencyFormId=23779454.

You might think no one would bother adding their 2 cents to such a daunting task, but since 1961, when a Texas woman's campaign led to a law allowing private citizens to pay down the public debt, Americans have donated tens of millions of dollars.

“Contributors range from schoolchildren, to organizations, to patriotic Americans,” says Lateefah Thompson, spokeswoman for the Bureau of the Public Debt, whose chat and e-mails with me this week motivated me to whip out my Visa card. If my example inspires just 15 Americans to donate $1 trillion each, or even 15,000 Americans to donate a billion bucks each, my job is done.

One donor dropped $3.5 million on the effort in 1992, but many contributors have sent dimes, nickels and pennies, Thompson says, resulting in more that $12 million in the last five years. Some of the donations have come from grateful immigrants who appreciate the opportunities given to them in their adopted land. Some people leave gifts when they die.

During fiscal year 2007, “an anonymous contributor sent in coins that had a value that far exceeded their face value,” Thompson says. “We received more than $1,000 for the two old coins…whose face value was less than $10. The General Services Administration auctioned them, and the proceeds were used as a gift to reduce the public debt.”

The Bureau of Public Debt accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards, and sends donors thank-you notes.

My contribution was embarrassingly modest, but if I had been able to charge the more entire $45,595.50 that represents my share of the national debt, I would have amassed enough credit card mileage points for a free flight to China to watch them deposit my donation.