Should the U.S. have no debt?

@Makhaidos: No We wouldn't. The US economy was going crazy in the 90s when the budget was "balanced", when the housing and tech bubbles that were being inflated popped, it allowed for a balanced budget, when they popped, the extra revinue went away. Also, they were able to balance the budget by including money going into social security in the budget where it shouldn't have been. If you ignore the social security trust fund (that the us can't spend other than to fund social security), the government was still spending more than it took in.

I definitely think the government should live within its means, just like any individual.

What's irksome is that we keep hitting this debt ceiling every so often without addressing the reason why we keep hitting it.

Some debt is fine.

Perhaps they need to stop sending billions to other countries and worry about their own. Give Haiti a fortune in aid but let Detroit go bankrupt. Makes perfect sense.

Foreign aid is like 1% of the budget... you could cut it all and it wouldn't really affect the deficit in a meaningful way.

I am but a young girl and know little of such things, but it seems to me that less debt is generally better, unless the alternative is worse (like when I take out a student loan; yeah, I'm now fifty thousand dollars in debt, but without it, I wouldn't have a college degree to stare at when I come home from working a menial soul-sucking retail job).

But eh. Not an economist.

When our government needs to BORROW each and every day in order to pay its bills, every expenditure needs to be addressed. I'd say the ones needing most scrutiny, first and foremost, are those which pay for foreign countries whether in terms of security, health, food, military aid, etc..,

I'll now address the person above you regarding student loans. Chances are students will be able to pay off a student loan debt just like people will eventually pay off their mortgages or car loans. Our government keeps compounding its debt and doesn't pay it down and will never be able to pay it off. Our politicians better hope the Fed, China and Japan don't stop buying our debt.

who gets to set what a responsible amount of debt it?

Debt can be a problem, but it doesn't have to be. All governments have to do is make sure that their debt grows at a rate slower than the taxbase. Anyone who tries to compare government debt to family or personal debt grossly misunderstands the issue. The vast majority of the money that the U.S. owes is to itself. Even China's share of the debt is only around 10%. Sh*t, as a nation we earn more on our international assets than we pay back out to foreign investors.

Ideally we would slowly transition towards a slowing down of the debt, which we actually are doing. Debt, can potentially be a problem, but it is not the chronic issue that everyone makes it out to be, and rapidly balancing the budget would likely cause more problems. Besides, as I already said, the deficit has been shrinking in recent years.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324085304579008922578996940

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/cbo-cuts-2013-deficit-estimate-by-24-percent.html

hell no..that's stupid. to pay off the debt in 75 years The U.S. economy would have to grow by double digits every year for the next 75 years.

What people seem to not realize is that America pays off its debt regularly. The reason our debt keeps rising is because we just keep borrowing more. People will still lend to the government at very cheap rates because the government actually doers pay off its debt.

Well its just a dumb thing to go after.

There are 4 things that need t change to balance the budget.

Social Security, Medicare/caid Defense, and Taxes.

Anything else is just a waste of time.

Its a worse day for china if they stop buying our debt.

It is one thing to have a debt of $100 billion or so, but when you get into 10s of trillions of dollars, then there is a problem. Right now, the US has a problem and it cannot keep spending it's way out of it. I hate to use the word austerity, but we do need to implement some austerity measures to help reign in our debt and work to getting it paid down to more reasonable or manageable levels and not what we are at now.

Austerity leads to more debt when the economy is in such a fragile place, go ask Europe about it.

Those 1%'s start adding up to big money. Nothing is a waste of time when your lifestyle is dependent on borrowing. We're building roads and schools in Iraq. Boatloads of $$$ are given to corrupt leaders in the Middle East. Look what we give to Israel. A natural disaster occurs and our leaders are fine with writing out checks. All of this adds up to a lot of money that we don't have to give.

How much money is spent benefiting foreign nations besides foreign aide? Think about what it costs to keep military bases up and running across the globe. Bases are located in Japan, South Korea, Germany and soon to be Afghanistan.

People, as I said, wouldn't be overly concerned and outraged if the deficit spending was minimal but it isn't. Over $17 trillion dollars in debt is where we are at and most of it has come since 2001 and there isn't an end in sight. A lot of the debt isn't even used here at home but instead it goes abroad.

The U.S. should engage in deficit spending during recessions to jumpstart the economy and to insulate the country from further economic harm like decrease in competitiveness or increases in poverty.

The U.S. should pay down it's debt during good economic times. During the last decade up to now, we've been doing it backwards.

While I agree that we need to reduce the deficit, measuring the level of debt as a number isn't helpful. That is to say, the raw number of dollars is irrelevant. The figure to be noted is the percent of debt relative to GDP.

Relative to GDP, were still doing alright. It can't keep growing at it's current level, but it's not the imminent disaster that some make it out to be.

This is something of a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for pointing it out.

I am on a personal level left dept free. Being dept free is awesome. The US government apparently dislikes the idea of being awesome..

We should take all the debt and pin it on some homeless guy.

Then the debt collectors'll come around and say "WHERE'S MY MONEY" and the homeless guy will say "EXCUSE ME, I WANT YOU IN MY BUM, JIMMY" and the collectors will slowly back away in aroused terror.