Would love to connect and hear your thoughts on how we are able to get out of this mess according to you then :).
First of all, it is critically important to frame the "mess" in a proper context of economic reality that doesn't misrepresent the data. The "debt" that you believe will be our undoing is not an actual debt that the private sector is, or can be, responsible to repay.
Spending and revenue for the monopoly issuer of our currency, Congress, are not connected except by a tracking entry that represents the difference (deficit) between them. This number, when aggregated over our history, is the debt. Because revenue is applied to this number when received it cannot then be recycled to "fund" anything after that. All federal spending is via newly created currency in the private sector.
Even a cursory understanding of basic dual entry accounting would disclose that the debt is nothing more than an accurate representation of our nation's net money supply in reserves and Treasury bonds. A negative in one sector becomes a positive in the sector it moved into, meaning the government's debt is the net of monetary assets of the private sector.
A balanced budget, the holy grail of pandering politicians, steals the resources and labor the government uses without payment that can retire private sector debt or be net saved in the private sector. This is not sustainable for more than a few quarters before bank default destroys the economic gains from private sector lending.
Only continual GDP growth makes it appear that it is real by rolling over private sector bank debt into new debt. This only works to the advantage of banks, until it doesn't and they need to be bailed out with massive injections of federal dollars. The "mess" involved here is that there is no economic benefit to the mainstream economy and the system, as it is now portrayed via our general econ illiteracy, is cyclical.
Our only way out is to abandon the failed experiment in trickle down and neoliberal economics. That means investing in our ability to remain productive without restraint from "revenue" that isn't even revenue in the common use of the term. We have known of this dynamic in federal finance since '46 when FDR ended convertibility of dollars to gold, but have not utilized the power of the purse since '80 out of the false fear of a largely irrelevant misnomer of accounting naming convention.
Is $31 Trillion too much money to have in the US economy? That largely depends upon its distribution and the available resources and labor the money was created to deploy. It is not a threat to anyone by itself.
