>>Paying of the interest on a debt gets you nowhere especially if the net amount still due continues to rise. This means you ain't even touching the principal and are not likely to even be paying off all the interest since the debt is so great.
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>Given the two alternatives, not paying anything toward the interest and in fact running budget deficits year to year (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II), or actually running budget surpluses and using at least some of the surplus to pay down the debt (Clinton), I'll take the later.

I would too, but this still only paid part of the interest and none of the principal, as far as I can tell. As for the http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1821&sequence=0#table1 link you gave, that just further confuses the issue because the [first] table that shows the debt held by the public does NOT include interest on the debt. Further down that page, you see the interest amounts continually decreasing even under all of the years for Bush II. I would suspect that the CBO is spinning the numbers just as much as OMB might be. So for me, I'll take the link to the Bureau of the Public Debt figures.