re: what happened to paying down the debt? 2 questions

Americans want to cut spending, but want their government to help them more. They want to pay down the debt, but we got to have a war with North Korea and them terrorists are on every corner, so we got to spend double on the military.

If the American public had a semblance of a brain, we wouldn't elect the same politicians from the same two parties who, despite their statements, still spend us into oblivion. The American public simply doesn't care. Leave it for their grandkids to worry about, and that's criminal imo.