Sell citizenships at >$1M each, and retire the debt.
(Controlling for foreign thieves, of course.)
Who would we get? The most productive people in the world.
I think a Dutch Auction every year for about 1,000,000 citizenships ought to do it.
Could we find one million people per year around the world who would part with $1M each? That would be $1 Trillion. If that were only applied to the debt, we could start paying it down.
Of course, we need to cut the living daylights out of government spending, primarily programs that cause dependency.
We could also permanently cut marginal tax rates, a proven method of increasing economic activity and therefore revenue to the treasury.
That’s my three point plan:
1) Permanently cut marginal tax rates.
2) Permanently cut welfare dependency programs.
3) Offer citizenship for cash to foreigners.
I think the economic growth caused by each of these would be so massive, we would pretty quickly run up a surplus and pay off the debt. All of it. Maybe in a decade or so.
The political price is impossibly high, though. It’s a nice pipe dream. Nobody will go for it, because it “hurts the poor, advantages the rich and foreigners.” Never mind that it would work well for everyone except Federal Bureaucrats and the Democrat Party.