As usual Mr Bussler is light and fast with figures scaring the public for no reason.
According to Investopedia the by the end of 2021 the public debt and I put that in quotation marks will be 102% of GDP [1[. Mr bussler claims public debt as high as it is relative to GDP but it doesn't say why. He presents it as if it's axiomatic with no supporting attribution. Yet there is strong evidence he is completely wrong. "governments in good standing generally don’t repay debt, they refinance it. So what really matters is the debt service cost. To be sustainable, debt interest must be comfortably payable from current income. For a country, therefore, public debt is sustainable indefinitely if the interest rate is equal to or less than the growth rate of nominal gross domestic product (NGDP)." [3]
Edit: Per Paul Krugman “government debt, which, I can’t help mentioning, was much higher relative to G.D.P. at the end of the Napoleonic Wars than it is today” [5]
First one must see what the debt is owed to [2]. Approximately 1/3 is only owed to overseas investors who likely bought US Treasury bonds. Similarly another third is owed to us investors for the same reason.
11% of the debt is owed to the Federal Reserve and 27% is owed to the government itself. This last segment is more about social security and other funds like that.
So one-third of the so-called debt is literally ledger items- moving numbers from one column to another internally.
Notice how people like mr. Butler always complain about the debt when they're not in charge and when is being used to help regular people rather than the wealthy or corporations. Apparently we can't have decent infrastructure, affordable child care or health care if it causes debt, but we can have debt if it means corporations can use tax cuts for stock buy-backs.
Finally, the debt ceiling is a false metric implemented in 1917 and is used as a weapon between the parties. Failure to raise the debt ceiling means we won't pay bills we have already incurred, much like walking out of the restaurant after you've already eaten dinner. It has nothing to do with future spending much like walking out now has nothing to do with going to a restaurant tomorrow. The debt ceiling is likely unconstitutional in my opinion anyways since Congress already authorized the spending. "The Fourteenth Amendment’s Public Debt Clause mandates that all the government’s financial obligations be met" [4] Biden and Yellen should just ignore the debt limit.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/updates/usa-national-debt/
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-who-owns-a-record-2121-trillion-of-us-debt-2018-08-21
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/17/everything-youve-been-told-about-government-debt-is-wrong/?sh=7cf38748314f
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/low-interest-rates-monetary-policy.html
