While I can't claim complete objectivity, I agree with your assessment a lot more than Legolas'. That said, the crisis with our debt isn't the debt itself, it's our refusal to act on it threatening a default. Again, it's important to remember that while our debt equals our GDP, 67% of that debt is to our own SS trust fund. We financed more spending and tax cuts by borrowing from the Boomers while they were working and vastly outnumbered retirees, with people telling us since the Reagan administration it couldn't continue because one day they'd retire. That day has come. Also once again, I suspect that's why a lot of the cuts are targeted at SS; the more we reduce its financial commitments, the longer we can avoid paying the IOUs filling it so it can meet those commitments (OTOH, SS isn't charging interest). We could cut EXISTING (not projected) federal debt nearly $10 trillion if we just got rid of SS, and thus the money we owe it; sometimes it feels like that's the plan.

The $4.5 trillion we owe China et al. is significant, certainly, but it's not crippling, by any means. What's crippling is that we continue to insist on spending more money and handing out more tax cuts. Medicare will cripple us in a few decades if we don't halt rapidly rising healthcare costs, but private healthcare costs rising three times faster will force action long before that point; it's bankrupting the whole country, but will bankrupt Medicare last (mainly for all the reasons we need national public healthcare, like every other country with electricity and running water). The only debt "crisis" America has is the same one it's had for a generation: We traded "tax and spend" for "cut taxes and spend, " and you can't do both. Tax cuts have the same effect as federal spending increases, but tax cuts are the one "entitlement" that's sacrosanct.