I agree with most of what you're saying, but why do you write that the debt is a drag on the economy? I'm not trying to be obtuse here. There are a lot of orth

I agree with most of what you're saying, but why do you write that the debt is a drag on the economy? I'm not trying to be obtuse here. There are a lot of orthodox claims about how the debt is a drag on the economy, but they're all bogus. There's the group of people who think that the debt makes it harder for private entities to borrow because of crowding out (both theoretically and empirically false) and there's the group of people who think that the debt is a drag on the economy because the government raises taxes in response to increasing interest payments - but they completely ignore the fact that the government doesn't have to raise taxes to pay the interest, and the government could in fact just use monetary policy to avoid paying any interest in the first place. So in the end, the whole debt-drag thing is just a neoclassic platitude. It's false, but conveniently used to further the conservative agenda.