$28 Trillion of US Debt

I thought it was an interesting tool, thanks for sharing. But it's very opinionated in often bizarre ways, where it required choices all of which seemed bad and often all choices would increase the debt. For example, it asked which free college choice should we offer, there was no "none" let alone a "reduce government loan subsidies" option. So I stopped partway as this seemed more like a tool trying to push a specific policy agenda (maybe good or bad, depending on your perspective) than actually balance the budget.

I'm also not very sure a bunch of small changes can really work. It's likely big dramatic changes are necessary. For example:

- replace all social welfare programs with basic income that we can afford.

- replace all healthcare with a universal healthcare system that focuses on free human-less diagnostics and generic drugs and otherwise a free market. (It would be very cheap to offer this and it would be dramatically better for most).

- cut military budget by 50%, but let the military itself determine how to cut. I was in the Army. There is easily 50% of waste there, but it is everywhere and you would need to implement a culture of budget awareness (e.g. don't start your tank to heat a can of soup).

- reduce prison population 90% of it's current level. Once or twice a year, just order prisoners from "most releasable" to "least releasable", and release anyone over a threshold.

You might disagree with these implementations, and that is fine, but somehow it feels large changes like this are dramatically more likely than killing a million small programs without them coming back.

Aaaaand it's blocked for those over seas. Great.

Greece isn't a sovereign state. It's part of the EU. Very different than the USA which controls it's own currency. US debt in the form of treasury bonds just provides the private sector (usually wealthy) with an interest bearing checking account. US doesn't even have to sell bonds. In fact, it spends first and THEN sells bonds.

Greece specifically does not have the worlds reserve currency and cant print more raffle tickets.

It wasn't debt, it was savings!

The point is that the US Government is more like a bank than a consumer. You put your money in, and expect to get your money back out. Your bank isn't in debt just because it owes its customers so much money. In fact a bank will owe customers more money than it has cash on hand, but it's not bankrupt.

The analogy is imperfect (as are all analogies), but it compensates for a lot of the issues that cause so much hand-wringing about the deficit. The more important observation is that inflation is low and so is the interest that the US government pays on new bonds (i.e. "deposits"). That means both that the situation is stable and that it's expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future.

There are more stabilizing steps to be taken in the future, and ideally they'll help lower the deficit and then the debt. But the OP's point is that it's not a crisis.