Comment by pdonis

Characterizing the problem as "debt" is misleading. The real problem is the government printing money. What we call the "national debt" is just government printed money where whoever "has" it can only draw on a portion of it (the interest) until a certain date (the maturity date of the government bond). And "paying back" the "debt" just means moving the government printed money from one account (the "bond" account) to another (the "bank account" of whoever gets the interest or sells the bond). The actual problem has nothing to do with "not being able to pay back the debt"; the government will just print more dollars (or more precisely, just move more accounting entries from the "bond" account to "bank" accounts). The actual problem is how printing money skews the economy and transfers wealth to the financial system from everyone else.