Not exactly.

The U.S. government is not the same entity as private U.S. entities.

The U.S. government is in debt to private U.S. institutions and persons.

While any issues that the U.S. government faces due to its debt won’t be because everyone will ask to collect on their debt at the same time, it’s a useful exercise to think about what would happen if they did do so, to test your implied claim that this is effectively the right hand borrowing from the left.

If everyone did collect at the same time, the following could happen: - The US government doesn’t pay. And a whole bunch of private entities would be dramatically poorer, but also, pretty much every bank and other financial entity’s balance sheet and reserves would break. There would be all sorts of terrible downstream effects. - The US government does pay, in which case it would have to cut massive number of services and increase taxes dramatically.

This situation isn’t gonna happen, but it does show that just the fact that the lenders are American doesn’t mean rhat there are no concerns. Especially since those lenders can very well choose not to buy American debt going forward if other options open up, such as the Chinese loosening monetary policy and boosting their consumer economy, or Japan growing its economy and exports since Japan already has mature and trusted sovereign debt instruments, but doesn’t have the economy to support the market size of U.S. debt, or Europe continues to issue significantly more debt, especially to build their defense industries.

Or, much more likely, a combination of all of these, along with other efforts such as, for example, countries like India, Nigeria, Brazil, starting to issue more debt to build a domestic renewable energy generation and transmission ecosystem in response to the Iran war.

The U.S. economy isn’t collapsing anytime soon. It’s too large, varied and strong for that.

But it’s been weakening nearly every pillar that it stands on for the last few years, and the fiscal debt risk is a major one of those.