Our debt honestly isn’t that bad.
When they founded the country, the founding fathers INTENDED to have a national debt. Believe it or not, SOME national debt will actually help your economy. This is because to make your national debt you sell government bonds. Those bonds have interest (though usually at low rates). So if you invest say $50 into government bonds today, in 20 years they may be worth $60 or something like that. This helps the economy because that interest is money made by the people, and in the mean time the government has the money to use. Currently, the biggest holder of US debt (between 50 and 60 %) is actually US citizens. The next biggest holder is the combination of Europe, followed by China, and Japan not far off there. (The commotion about China is that over the last decade they’ve been the biggest buyer, but around half of our debt is actually from the Reagen era, and China wasn’t the buyer).
The problem is that a healthy national debt is somewhere around 75% of your annual GDP. Currently ours is about to hit 100% of our annual GDP. Now this isn’t the end of the world, its been here and far worse before (during WW2 and the Civil War it exceeded 150% GDP). But it needs to be toned down.
The problem, believe it or not, began with Reagen. He cut the highest tax bracket from around 70%, to around 30% (fun side note, during the 50s under Truman and Eisenhower the US saw its biggest economic boom ever, and the highest tax bracket was around 90%). The deficit skyrocketed under Reagen, and made the debt go up by huge amounts. Clinton managed to bring the deficit down (his last year in office it was only 18 billion dollars, whilst Bush handed Obama a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit). But NO president or congress since Reagen has been willing to either cut social programs to match the tax income, or increase the taxes on the rich to where they should be. Heck Bush’s huge tax cuts, came right out of the pockets of China, it was a 1.5 trillion dollar (combined) addition to the national deficit. So basically enjoy the tax cut that your grandchildren will be paying for.