I feel like the well has been poisoned regarding national debt talk. There is simply no point in having a conversation about the debt without discussing how revenue should be raised and/or expenses lowered. That means someone focusing purely on the debt being bad is likely doing it because they know their specific proposals for addressing it won't be popular.

If I could wave a magic wand and get the policies I want, I would abolish essentially all taxes except a Land Value Tax. At an average of $10,000 per acre and a roughly 1.4 Billion acres of private property that we could “reasonably” collect on, that is $14 Trillion in Revenue per year. Split between the Federal, State, and Local governments proportionally, leaving around ~$8 trillion for the Feds. If we could keep the Federal budget under $7 trillion, then $1 trillion per year could service the debt.

It would take nearly 40 years to pay it off at that rate. But if we save for 49, a Jubilee of Jubilee years, we could essentially wipe out all debt in this country.

Real pie in the sky fantasy stuff to think people could follow an “eat your vegetables” tax and budget plan for 40+ years and also accept what is ostensibly a massive property tax hike, the least popular tax ever.

Maximalist schizo version: https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Does anyone look at this debt and believe it will ever get paid off? It seems more realistic that everyone's waiting for some doomsday WW3 scenario where we just say ehh let's reset everyone back to zero.

I used to deeply care about this, but I find that generally the party not in power always complains about this and then immediately stops complaining once they are in power, so I have trouble taking it seriously.

For Example: Republicans when Obama was in Office, Democrats when Trump is in Office, Republicans when Biden is in Office

It’s been like 2 decades of both parties complaining and then doing nothing about it once they gained power.

We have a debt-base currency. Borrowing creates money but the opposite is also true: when someone repays a loan, money is actually destroyed. So it's not surprising that over 80% of total government debt is privately owned, mostly by the super rich. The top 1% benefit enormously from government debt. (but also pensions and insurance companies)

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