Existing comment:
A Sketch of the Finances:
1796 -- In March, Thomas Jefferson had expressed the wish to Madison that Gallatin would "present us with a clear view of our finances, and put them in a form as simple as they will admit... The accounts of the United States ought to be, and may be made as simple as those of a common farmer, and capable of being understood by common farmers." Gallatin dedicated his summer with the Nicholsons to preparing a monumental response to Jefferson's suggestions. A Sketch of the Finances of the United States, issued by a New York printer in November, 1796, was a volume of two hundred pages, including an appendix of nineteen tables. The tables confirmed Jefferson's notion that the debt had been increasing at a rate of a million dollars a year from $72,776,000,000 in 1790 to $78.697,000,000 in 1796. |