If I owe you a hundred dollars and don't pay, I am in trouble.
If I owe you a hundred BILLION dollars and don't pay, who is in trouble now?
And who is going to lend you the next billion dollars without some assurances?
And who is going to lend you the next billion dollars without some assurances?
I agree. But you have to see that the debt issue, although important, is not the world breaker that some claim. The howlers act as though the lender nations will suddenly remove the money from the table and we will thrash about with no funding sources. This is just stupid.
I am a libertarian and as anti-govt spending as you can get. I have a daughter who qualifies for all kinds of disabilty "supplements" and don't use them b/c I am ideologically opposed to them (they are IMMORAL, not just bad fiscal policies).
However, it is really silly to fear that other nations will jerk their funding. Most of the "debt" is in bonds, which are investments in OUR economy, rather than theirs. Their purchasing of our debt instruments are votes of confidence at this point in time. Further, it is extremely silly to point to debt levels only. Another illustration may help: I once owed about 60,000 dollars. That was a crushing debt load, as my income was only about 52 thousand a year. Now I owe about 140,000 dollars (not counting my mortgage..., in fact, my debt is more than my mortgage). I am not nearly as worried about that as I was when I owed 60K, because my income is almost 5 times what it was then, and I am paying off the debt more rapidly. Debt is all a matter of percentages. We actually owed more money as a country right after the Revolutionary War than we do now. We also owed more money during the Reagan years.
Do I wish we owed NO money? Yeah. I do. But it is not the "we are on the brink of the precipice" kind of nonsense you hear bandied about.