the Feds are raking in about $3.6 trillion per year from taxes, fines, investments and other sources of income. So the government could pay off its debts in less than six years if it focused all of its income on debt repayment.
You hear a lot about the federal debt number, but you almost never hear about the US asset number. Just how much is the entire USA worth? If we sold every asset in the country, how much cash could we raise?
...by estimating the total balance sheet of households and nonprofit organizations, as well as the total assets of US banks. Combine those two and you get $128.18 trillion (Bigger than the total wealth of Europe and Asia)..
Well, first the US gov cannot "focus all of its income on debt repayment" any more than a household can. The real question is how much unallocated income can the Fed free up by cutting public benefits before the recipients of those benefits vote them out of office, or, in some cases, shift critical campaign donations to their opponents? Politically, those vast unfunded liabilities are much harder to default on or inflate away than the public debt. You can cheat the Chinese easier than you can cheat the Social Security and Medicare recipients.
Second, if every private and public entity in the US sold off its assets and magnanimously donated the proceeds to bail out the national government, who would buy all that stuff while all the potential buyers are selling? it is just as if everyone in the stock market decided to "cash in their chips" at the same time. They could not really obtain the nominal value of their assets. This is known as the "fallacy of composition." The other problem is that the present value of the Feds' total unfunded liabilities, not just the official national debt, is now in the neighborhood of $200 trillion. In addition, states, counties, cities, firms and other private entities, and households all have substantial debts as well. This problem is not exaggerated.
Third, just focusing on the narrow problem of the official Federal "debt held by the public" for a moment, it is a historical fact that countries that accumulate a public debt greater than 90% of their GDP have had a very difficult time avoiding reduced growth rates and financial crises. I highly recommend Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow." One issue he deals with is that we all tend to rationalize why we will beat the odds, such as finishing a project much faster than others have finished similar projects, or why real estate prices in our city would not crash even if they did everywhere else, or why we can cope with debt burdens that have crippled others. What we ignore is that others usually had their own reasons why they were exceptions to the rule. This time is not different, we are not exceptional, and people who think this way are usually deluding themselves.