question about the National Debt for all of you economist types....

[Yo_Mama]

7. We thought it was a good thing at the time, but much of it was due to a bubble.

A bubble that was not sustainable. In many ways our current difficulties date back to that period - that was when the Depression-era firewalls between investment and commercial banks were broken down.

Bubbles produce temporarily high tax proceeds, but then the tax proceeds later drop by more than they increased.

Countries that run too high deficits for too long do get into problems.

The metric to look at is total debt (not just government debt) as a percent of GDP. If total debt gets too high, much of the productive capacity (annual income) is diverted into servicing debt, and economic growth slows in a very intractable way.

So, yes, controlling our overall debt levels will be necessary for future growth.