As here, is often ignored are two levers available to resolve our debt.

> The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it"

This is not the argument. The argument is more along the lines that our leadership just weeks ago rallied around a sharp increase in the rate of our debt accretion, so obviously erasing the debt is not a political priority at this time.

Given that erasing the debt is not a political priority, good stewardship demands that deficit spending should align with uses that will generate positive long-term financial returns to Americans (e.g. cancer research) instead of negative returns (deporting agricultural and construction workforces).

Making cuts that will have the effect of slowing the long-run growth rate of the US economy and its overall competitiveness will also make it harder to erase the debt should that ever become a political priority.

What’s the counter to the standard “nation-states do not run like family budgets, especially when the nation-state is the global hegemon”? Or “Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.”?

That at every point in the past and almost certainly in the future, global hegemons don't stay that way once their currency is sufficiently devalued and no longer held as the reserves of other nations.

This is true and correct, but none of it will matter if we keep letting the olds bleed the last drops from our country and continue pissing away the majority of our budget on social security and medicare. Until those are gone and the majority of the federal budget thereby removed, this remains an intractable problem.