People vastly overestimate the importance of national debt. It doesn't mean shit. Its mostly owned to domestic bond holders or the federal reserve.

Here's how the national debt works:

Ronald Reagan in his infinite wisdom decreed that taxes were unpopular so he lowered them. He didn't lower spending. He made up the difference by borrowing government bonds, mostly from the same rich people that he could have been taxing anyway.

The net effect: Very little. You still have money going from rich people to the government, but now rich people get some bonds back. Some argue that rich people are too rich and,are getting richer. They're not wrong, but this is hardly a systematic crisis or a national catastrophe.

Later, the government needed even more money, but still didn't want to raise taxes. so it decided to print money. However, it wanted to do this properly, so it technically it borrowed money from the federal reserve, who's job is to print money. This raised the national debt substantially. Theoretically, the government has to pay the federal reserve back so that the fed can burn all of the money that they printed before. But if they never do that, It's not like anything bad would happen.

We also owe some money to foreign countries, which is useful for maintaining trade deficits... you had the situation where the U.S. bought more from china than china bought from the U.S., so china had a bunch of dollars and not much to do with them. So they used the dollars to buy national debt. But later they got scared and stopped buying national debt, and started selling the debt they had. So now they just keep the dollars, and don't buy debt. But that's OK, we printed more dollars, so we'll still have plenty of dollars. It's not a big problem, really.

In the grand scheme of things none of this really matters, since the money economy its all an abstraction--what really matters is resources, production, and distribution, etc. U.S. is doing fine in all of those areas, except maybe distribution could use some improvement. It's not like the Iraq war drained us of any natural resources.