United States Had $10.6 Trillion in Debt When Obama Took Office

How much debt (national public debt load) did the United States have when Barack Obama took office in early 2009? This is a question that I receive often, so I thought that I would answer it in a post.

Barack Obama officially started his presidency on January 20th, 2009.

According to TreasuryDirect.gov, the United States had a total debt load of $10,628,881,485,510.23 on January 20th, 2009.

At the time of this article (January 19th, 2012), the current outstanding public debt load of the United States was:

$15,236,288,061,558.65

This means that the US national debt load has grown 43.3% since President Obama took office in early 2009.

Note: An up-to-date US debt total can be found here.

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Now, it's only fair to note that the CBO was predicting before the 2008 election that there would be a trillion dollar plus deficit posted in 2009, regardless of who was elected. It's also important to note that the 2009 budget was signed by George W. Bush.

Source: TreasuryDirect.gov