If you believe the media hype, a storm awaits America. The US government will have to fight off neo-Nazi religious fanatics, massive climate change, financial armageddon, mass species extinction, alien invasion, dollar dominance collapse, Russia and/or China, near-earth celestial objects, new pandemics, systemic racism, and evil billionaires, likely all at the same time.

While more than one of those threats are overblown and/or unlikely, nobody knows what the future will bring other than that something bad will certainly happen at some point. So why aren’t policymakers eager to pay down the national debt? A small national debt is the best security blanket America has ever had, and arguably the reason it expanded so quickly and won all of its wars, the important ones anyway.