Matthew Yglesias posts this tidy little chart on "The Fake Debt Crisis" (from Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century):
What does it show? It shows, explains Yglesias, "that on a net basis the United States of America does not have any public debt and perhaps never did." I have emphasized that striking conclusion, although the key word is net.
The conventional way for debt scaremongers to measure the national debt is to compare gross public debt to GDP. But the normal way you measure the debt load of a business or a household is to ask for a net figure. Just because you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgage debt doesn't mean you're a pauper. In fact it probably means you're a rich person who owns an expensive house.... [I]t's simply not the case that a large amount of gross debt is a sign of overextension. It's typically a sign of prosperity and creditworthiness.
The scaremongering, however, won't relent. It's an easy conservative sell as long as the debt is Obama's or some other Democratic president's. Once, or rather if, conservatives get their own man in office, debt, once again, won't matter.