Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.
It's a liability because the U.S. has promised to pay it. We haven't committed to a level of military spending backed by our full faith and credit.
EDIT: Never mind! Apparently we can just cut social security payments.
In Flemming v. Nestor SCOTUS ruled that SS benefits are not guaranteed contractual rights but are instead statutory entitlements that Congress may modify or revoke.
The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.
The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.
a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"
In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is super-counterintuitive, but the debt has little to do with the deficit. We could run a surplus and still be in the same level of debt (in fact, this would be a tremendous place to be). We could run a deficit and have no debt (just print money, duh). The decisions that go into column A generally do not impact the decisions our leaders have to make in column B, though there are of course convenient relationships between the two.
Repayment to $0 isn't a reasonable goal but there are a lot of problems with your argument.
The biggest question is about sustainability. Is the debt-to-GDP ratio stable/manageable and is the interest rate on the debt below the economy's growth rate? If the answer is no, you have a problem.
> High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is backwards. The amount of debt is set mostly by government supply, which is driven by deficits. The demand signal is the price, which in this case is the yield. If the demand was high, yields would drop as the amount of debt grew. Instead, we have rising debt and rising yields, which means supply outstrips demand.
The US no longer has a AAA sovereign credit rating for a reason. When Moody's (the last agency to downgrade the US) stripped the US of its AAA rating, it cited "rising debt and interest costs 'that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.'"
The biggest issue at this point isn't the principal, it's the interest. Interest is the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. It's almost at $1 trillion/year now and expected to nearly double by 2035. You either have to cut from other spending or borrow more to pay the interest.
Your comment implies that this doesn't have a real cost, which is silly.
No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.
Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.
Argentina is doing fine. The real constraint would be that defaulting on the debt would cause a credit crisis and bank collapses.
The powerful people holding the debt will seek to change the government to one that obeys them