This, along with deficits and federal expenditures as percentages of GDP, are staple rationalizations of the Left to defend debt, deficits, and federal expenditures.

The debt has been growing alarmingly, and we aren't currently fighting World War II or repaying war debt.

Deficits are record-breaking, casting Bush and the GOP into insignificance.

Federal expenditures (the federal government as a fraction of the economy) will already eventually exceed historical fractions (rising into heretofore unknown and alien larger fractions) simply because of the structure and eventual fiscal failures of Social Security and Medicare as they exist today. (The Trustees have warned people, with many people to no avail, for years about this.) What happens if the Dems get their way with the worst of the bad taxing-and-spending-so-much-more activity they seek, as well as the great expansion of entitlements (as opposed to the reform they tokenly lie about) they seek nowadays?

It is not overreaching to anticipate the obvious that is to come, given what we're now seeing with the running rampant of the lib Dems, who have truly dwarfed into effective or practical insignificance (if not yet complete negligibility) the misspending by Bush and the GOP the previous year (something, acting truly like Democrats, that cost them re-election in 2006 and 2008, notably).

Be it with rationalizations that appeal to the still-Dem-loving exploitable such as a continued “need” to be interventionist to “stimulate the economy” (so long as it will re-elect Democrats, in particular), or for other reasons, it's predictable that eventually, if the lib Dems have their way, we can see

* Inflation to monetize the bulging debt;

* Partial, selective, “surgical” or “strategic” repudiation of the debt (often by reissuing lesser-paying debt);

* (Generally) Inflation as the true feel-good vote-buying opiate of large numbers of exploitable Dem voters.

Trivia such as inflation-indexing the bonds that the Chinese hold (which, for all I know, might already have been a subject of closed-door meetings recently among the top Dems and the Chinese) are merely other, smaller, also-predictable consequences.

Anyway, I do agree with the larger point that the U.S. govt must make its debt a higher concern. We are going to have to simultaneously grow the economy and save our way out of the mess.