Comparisons to personal finance are apt, likening the situation to an individual mired in escalating credit card debt who, rather than curbing spending, continues to splurge, inevitably hurtling towards financial ruin.

Pure garbage econ, and all of the fancy graphs you can include doesn't even begin to cover the stench of outright propaganda (or ignorance, you choose). Where do you think our currency comes from? Here's a clue: It doesn't grow on rich people or their corporations.

Our money is a product of law and is issued by Congress when it spends to deploy resources in the private sector. Congress never has, or doesn't have, money, regardless of its "revenue" (an oxymoron for regular morons in this context) position. When its position is in deficit it increases the money supply with spending, and decreases it if it is in surplus. Every deficit is good for someone on the other side of the sectoral line of accounting, and the accumulation of deficits, the national debt that has everyone's hair in constant flames, is the aggregate net money supply of the non-govt sectors.

That this "debt" is represented primarily by Treasury bond issues is a '"feature" that enhances the value of the currency, not a detriment or a mortgage on future productivity. Paying it off would be a fool's errand and has proven to be such in the few serious attempts made to reduce it in the past (7). They have all resulted in recessions or depressions by simply changing the momentum of the money supply.