Pay off National Debt - sell Federal Land ?

Capital(ist) idea.

More likely one 40 trillion dollar bill will be printed, maybe obama will be on it, in about 15 years

In reality all we have to do is balance the budget, then through the natural process of inflation will diminish the debt ratio. Eventually it will reach a point that we do just pay it off.

No

Because in 50 years we will be back in the same situation saying that we need to sell the rest of the land

Let them create a sustainable balanced budget first then we will reconsider your proposal

Here is what is so scary and why this wouldn't work. You would have to get about $77K per acre to pay off the national debt

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Why is the debt bad? What happens if we don't pay it? It's not like a house that they can just come and take back.

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El Oh El

Because when the debt becomes so great that the interest is greater than what we could possibly pay back then we default on our debt and the currency loses its value. Our currency isn't back up by gold, remember?

Infact, the interest doesn't even have to become that much higher, people just have to lose faith in our ability to pay it back. Then people start asking for a higher and higher rate to buy US debt. This starts a vicious cycle and leads to the scenario where we can't even pay back the interest on the debt.

You think we are indestructible? That is very naive

50 year? More like one year

Until entitlements are under control we are not going to fix our fiscal problems

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Our debt is higher than our GDP.

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no it's not, it's at like 70% gdp

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Why is the debt bad?
What happens if we don't pay it?

It's not like a house that they can just come and take back.

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The most basic reason is economics. (tl;dr at the bottom)

The US Dollar is a fiat currency (in the most basic form, it's value is determined by the belief that the federal government can and will pay off its debts). So while the federal government keeps a low amount of debt and pays its bills regularly, the Dollar has the best chance of remaining strong (which means things costing less).

If the US accrues too much debt and begins missing payments or is late, the Dollar suffers a hit. Do this enough and we end up with a collapsing economy.

The debt is primarily owned by the citizenry through government securities, much of which is purchased as part of retirement packages (401k's and the like). Just not paying it means people and companies take massive hits to their investments (the likes of which would make the Great Depression look like a warm and fuzzy memory of a picnic). It would also mean the collapse or near collapse of many other world markets (when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold).

Over the past decade the US has paid roughly $400B in interest payments each year while spending an average of $790B in deficit spending (ie: creating almost twice as much debt as paying off). That number has a large skew due to the Obama-Stimulus years where annual deficits topped $1T, but even now we are sitting on estimates of ~$500B in deficit spending each year for the foreseeable future without a single plan being debated in Congress on holding spending in check, much less beginning to pay down out ~$20T in debt.

The debt is bad because there's far too much of it, it's still accruing at an alarming rate and there's no plan at all in any committee anywhere in Congress to get us to even a balanced budget, much less begin paying down some of the debt.

tl;dr - Our economy (and much of the world economy) goes into the shitter (See: Greece or Venezuala).

Great idea... I like a lot