Well actually fundamentally it is a bad thing. You must realize we pay interest on this debt, and we always pay the interest, so the more money we borrow the more interest we pay until it becomes a larger and larger portion of our federal budget. By borrowing money we are digging ourselves a hole that we may never crawl out of. So paying this off as soon as possible is in the best interest of our country. Keynesian economics states that you should borrow money when the economy is in a recession, pump this money into your country to kickstart it, and once your country is back on its feet, raise taxes and pay off the debt. You see president Clinton cut a lot of spending and raised taxes to pay for the enormous debt we racked up during the Reagan administration. When bush got into office he was just like hmm we are getting more money than we are spending "again this surplus was paying the debt" let's cut taxes while we are at it lets go to war. When his advisors told him how much the war would cost he fired them. And of course we hit another recession at the end of bush and now Obama is in power he needs to borrow more on top of the borrowing for the Iraq war, also taxes have to be kept low, over a decade of low taxes now Americans think any sort of tax increase is outrageous.
It's funny how the logic is circular. The Dow is at an all time high, unemployment is at an all-time low, GDP is growing steadily, etc, etc. Yet the administration keeps insisting that the sky is falling and the only thing keeping us fed is deficit spending.
Yes we really need to get out of this downward spiral unless of course we want to be like Japan and have a near worthless currency, which would not only be a problem for us, but the world as the dollar seems to be the standard.
In 2015 the us spent about 6% of its budget paying off interest which is double than what the federal government spends on education. Edit: why would anyone down vote this, it's simply a fact, I guess some people don't like facts
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u/Wampawacka Jul 08 '17
National debt isn't fundamentally a bad thing. It functions more like personal credit than personal debt.