It puts it into perspective that in past generations the national debt to GDP we have had for the last decade was actually war time spending and thus could be fixed by post war peace.

We do not have that luxury  this is just living above our means.

“As the national debt of the United States rose in 2013 to nearly $17 trillion- -just over 100 percent of Gross Domestic Product- Wall Street was no longer yawning, as Professor Boskin put it nine years earlier.

It is one thing to have a national debt as large as the Gross Domestic Product, or larger, at the end of a major war, for the return of peace meads drastic reductions in military spending, which presents an opportunity to begin paying down that national debt over the ensuing years. 

But to have a comparable national debt in peacetime presents more grim options, because there is no indication of the kind of reduction of government spending which occurs at the end of a war.”

Thomas Sowell in Basic economics of 440

@ThomasSowell