“Debt gets paid off by keeping tax revenue low (enough to fund the Constitutional duties of the federal government) and not spending on socialism.”
True in principle, and the best possible course forward anyway, but it’s too late for that to work. The debt we have already built up is too big to ever really be paid back. Too great a percentage of current workers earnings would have to be confiscated for generations. Maybe if we financed it over a thousand years. What is most likely to happen is that the debt that cannot be really paid will not be paid. We could have a debt crisis and a resolution in the form of an honest repudiation. Those who relied on “the full faith and credit” would lose what they had risked and the consequences would fall primarily on them. Since almost all of us have some exposure at least indirectly to the value of government debt, we would all be part of the “them” that bore the consequences. The world economic system would be severely disrupted, to say the least, and we would have to start over with a new form of money, but the debt would be liquidated. Another good effect would be we would be unable to borrow any more, at least for a while. But such an “honest” outcome is highly unlikely. The easiest path is to reduce the size of the debt by inflating it away. Reduce the value of the “dollar” enough and you can make any nominal debt payoff manageable.