About 88 thousand per person. Sucks but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. Still it would take a real seachange of politics and thinking.
We also have to look at who we owe the debt to and is some of that debt perceived only and really artificial. Telling people that they owe collectively 31 trillion when maybe a third of that might be bogus can be a fear control device in the same way covid was. Still unfunded future liabilities is more a potential killer of the nation. Social security promises, military, prisons, and welfare future spending is some 100 trillion dollars of future “to be acquired debt”...though not being owed just yet.(I haven’t even counted the states just yet)
I suspect we could make a huge dent in the federal dollars owed if we put heart, will, and be willing to sacrifice a few things. There is a lot of money to be found under the federal spending “cushings”. The politicians and the current political structures of the nation are the problem...but they are only a problem in that they really are reflexive of their constituencies in the main. The people need a moral change in their hearts or nothing will save us!
You have better understanding of the situation than most, but you are profoundly more optimistic than is warranted.
It all starts with a fact. The substance called money is created from nothingness by the Federal Reserve. Entirely whimsical. No that doesn’t mean the answer is gold backing. Or any other kind of backing. It doesn’t mean anything other than it comes from nothingness and we should never forget that.
Once that is firmly in one’s mind, most follow on thinking becomes more clearly an exercise in attempts to do math on a substance whose value is purely imaginary. Oh, society uses it, it buys food, but only because both parties of the transaction willingly forget it came from nothingness. They imagine things.
This is why there are no real laws of economics. Supply and demand isn’t a law. It’s a pretense.
And as for the portion of $31T owed to something not bogus (meaning not owed to the Fed), it’s over 2/3. The Fed balance sheet is a little under 10T. They would like to lower that, but that’s extracting money from The System. Destimulus. They get punished every time they try.
Because it all failed. Capitalism functions only as a result of the Fed adding money. There is outright proof of this. GDP grows (not in %) in dollar terms an amount less than deficit for a year. Capitalism is taking that money fed to it by the Fed and government in general and it eats some. It’s not pump priming. It is leak. The money disappears back to the nothingness from which it originated.
This DESTROYS old style conservatism. Conservatism is defined as
Drain the Swamp
Build the Wall
American First In All Things
Pro 2nd Amendment
Pro Life
And nothing else, certainly nothing having to do with imaginary value.