REAL value is how much someone WILL ACTUALLY pay for them.
The USS Ronald Reagan has a real value, that someone like the Chinese would pay. The US capitol not so much.
Then there is the question of who are the buyers?
There are 403 billionaires in the US. With a combined worth of approximately $1.3 Trillion.
2 problems here. First, all the worth of these billionaires isn't just sitting in some bank somewhere, as idle cash. Its locked up in ASSETS (just like the US ASSETS), in order for those billionaires to buy US assets, they would either have to borrow (go in debt, to pay off government debt) or sell their assets to buy other assets. The problem with this is, I doubt Bill Gates is willing to sell $66 billion in valuable stock, that makes money, to buy government land in New Mexico, that grows scrub grass. (Besides, if all the billionaires liquidated themselves to buy government assets, WHO would BUY their assets??? (And with all the billionaires selling off their assets, there would be a glut in the market, forcing stock prices to plummet, so Bill Gates wouldn't actually be worth $66 Billion, more like $10 Billion)
Next issue. Like I mentioned earlier, there are 403 billionaires in the US, currently worth about $1.3 Trillion. Their entire net worth is only about this years deficit. The entire US debt is over $16 Trillion.
Its easy to SAY that the US government has XXX amount in assets, its quite another thing to find buyers for those assets.
The point being, there isn't enough money in the world to pay off the debt.
BUT... if we keep printing it, there soon will be.
You don't have to sell an asset to determine it's value ~ simply impute the income by looking at the records.
Here's your situation ~ you live in a country where the federal government owns 30% of the surface area and 100% of the offshore claims. The offshore areas are, of course, literally stupendous ~ most of the claimable bed of the Pacific Ocean to start with.
One hydrocarbon deposit in Montana was reported by Newt Gingrich at being worth over $100 trillion if worked. That's on federal lands. The nearby deposits on privately owned land are doing well also.
But the biggest asset is our combined military forces. We could probably get well over $3 trillion a year through the simple expedient of demanding tribute ~ no more mamby pambly United Nations garbage!
I"ve proposed issuing a US currency backed by asset production.