These official debt figures do not even include the large unfunded liabilities inherent in the largest federal entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, and several others that comprise about two-thirds of federal spending.
There tends to be confusion between annual federal budget deficits and the total outstanding federal debt.
We're referring here to the debt, not simply to the annual budget deficits that continue to increase the debt every time the federal government spends more than it receives in tax revenue.
Is there any motivation to attempt a debt payoff? Many Americans appear to have been lulled into accepting some variant of modern monetary theory, which has infected the populace like a virus, and which a small fringe group of economists believe allows a sovereign nation with its own sovereign currency to spend without limit, being able simply to issue more of its own currency to pay off any debt with impunity.
If there is any motivation to pay off the federal debt, what would this payoff actually entail? In the simplest terms, dividing the current outstanding $34 trillion debt by the current US population of 334,233,854 yields a one-time per capita payoff figure of $101,725.
Another approach to pay off the federal debt over time might be to structure the debt payoff similarly to an amortized mortgage.
Anyone reading this far must conclude that this is a fatuous exercise, that there is no achievable way to pay off the current federal debt within the lifetimes of Americans currently alive, and that the only possible remedy is to begin curtailing federal spending to avoid taking on additional debt.
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