Why is this a meaningful figure? It's not debt that matters its how much it costs to finance it. It's Finance 101 that if you manage to borrow below inflation rate, and you have the luck that what you paid for appreciates, then your debt will disappear over time.

On the contrary, trivial amounts of money with usury can ruin you financially.

This Finance 101 perspective is too clever by half.

Sounds like a great idea, right? But what if something out of your control[1] happens, and average interest rates on the debt burden go up from 2% to 14%? The USA can't afford to just pay off all of its debts. It must continuallly roll over it's old debts to new debts, and could easily find itself in a situation where debt servicing costs go up by an order of magnitude if the fiscal situation changes for long enough.

[1] Or in the case of the United States, you do something very stupid and very inside of your control

> It's Finance 101 that if you manage to borrow below inflation rate

And when was the last time that happened? Pretty much only during inflation spikes. The vast majority of time, inflation is around 2% or maybe 3 or 4 recently, 10 year Treasury yields is well above 4.5%.

So maybe you have 40T USD lying around, and you're willing to lend it all to uncle Sam for inflation -.1%. if that's not the case then it's finance 101, and wishful thinking