Did the national debt ever go down during Clinton?The confusion is due to the fact that there is more than one measure of the debt (and deficit). By the "national debt", I assume that you are talking about the "Gross Federal Debt" which is currently about $8.3 trillion. Another major measure of the debt is the "Debt Held by the Public" which is currently about $4.8 trillion. Both of these measures of debt can be seen listed at
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt.htm . As can be seen, the Gross Federal Debt is equal to the Debt Held by the Public plus Intragovernmental Holdings. This latter category includes funds that have been borrowed from Social Security and other trust funds. Its composition can be seen in the table at the bottom of
http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/debt07.html . Regarding the debt under Clinton, following is an excerpt of the first table at this location:
FEDERAL DEBT AT THE END OF FISCAL YEAR: 1940-2011
(in billions of dollars)
Foreign
Federal Social Public deficit as % of
Gross Public Foreign Gov't Security Medicare ---------------- Public
Year Debt Debt Debt Accounts Debt Debt Total Foreign Debt
---- ------- ------- ------- -------- -------- -------- ------- ------- ------
1992 4001.8 2999.7 535.2 1002.1 319.2 139.2 -310.7 -57.9 17.8
1993 4351.0 3248.4 591.3 1102.6 365.9 149.4 -248.7 -56.1 18.2
1994 4643.3 3433.1 655.8 1210.2 422.7 150.5 -184.7 -64.5 19.1
1995 4920.6 3604.4 800.4 1316.2 483.2 143.4 -171.3 -144.6 22.2
1996 5181.5 3734.1 978.1 1447.4 549.6 152.3 -129.7 -177.7 26.2
1997 5369.2 3772.3 1218.2 1596.9 630.9 151.2 -38.3 -240.1 32.3
1998 5478.2 3721.1 1216.9 1757.1 730.3 157.8 51.2 1.3 32.7
1999 5605.5 3632.4 1281.4 1973.2 855.0 184.1 88.7 -64.5 35.3
2000 5628.7 3409.8 1057.9 2218.9 1006.9 214.0 222.6 223.5 31.0
2001 5769.9 3319.6 1005.5 2450.3 1169.8 239.2 90.2 52.4 30.3
2002 6198.4 3540.4 1200.8 2658.0 1328.9 267.8 -220.8 -195.3 33.9
2003 6760.0 3913.4 1454.2 2846.6 1484.5 275.9 -373.0 -253.4 37.2
2004 7354.7 4295.5 1836.6 3059.1 1635.4 282.0 -382.1 -382.4 42.8
2005 7905.3 4592.2 2070.0 3313.1 1809.0 294.6 -296.7 -233.4 45.1
As can be seen, the Gross Federal Debt never did go down under Clinton. It's smallest increase was $23.2 billion from 1999 to 2000. The Debt Held by the Public, however, did go down a total of $452.7 billion from 1997 to 2001. Whichever measure of the debt is used, the deficit situation was much better under Clinton. The following graph shows the corresponding measures of the deficit since 1970:
The red line shows the "Gross Deficit" (the change in the Gross Federal Debt) and the blue line shows the "Public Deficit" (the change in the Debt Held by the Public). As can be seen, they both improved greatly under Clinton and have grown much worse under Bush.
Did Clinton spend more money than any president before him including Reagan. Since the end of World War II, spending has likely increased with every 4-year presidential term, at least when measured in absolute dollars. A much fairer comparison is to look at spending as a percentage of GDP. The following graph shows revenues and spending, as a percentage of GDP, since 1950:
As can be seen, spending as a percentage of GDP decreased fairly sharply under Clinton and has increased under Bush. The numbers and sources for both of the prior graphs can be seen at
http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/def07.html .