Oh no! You just threw a REALLY BIG NUMBER at me. Should I be scared?

Let me make an analogy.....

What if I told you that my neighbor has a ONE MILLION DOLLAR mortgage on his home. Holy crap! A one million dollar mortgage? That's a huge number for a mortgage, isn't it? That's pretty scary. Well, maybe, sort of.

What if I told you that my neighbor is a union janitor and his wife is a stay at home mom? Their household income is $35,000/year. That one million dollar mortgage is pretty scary. In fact, it just got a lot scarier.

But what if I told you my neighbor is an executive at a Fortune 500 Company and he makes $500,000 per year? Now that $5,000-ish/month mortgage payment on that one million dollar mortgage note doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it?

The point is that you can't look at the raw debt of the US government in isolation. 17T, actually, 17.3T is a big number, but we also have a huge economy that can afford to pay this debt (so far). Yes, we're running deficits. Yes, those deficits can't last forever. But that doesn't mean this problem won't be fixed in the future. And, believe it or not, as a % of GDP, we've been in deeper debt than we are now- about 60 years ago. I wonder if your grandfather was pinning messages of gloom and doom on the bulletin boards of yesteryear?