When people talk about US debt, they're not talking about something like your credit card bill. When the US needs to take on debt, they do it by issuing Treasury bonds.
These bonds are a contract saying that in exchange for your money today, the US government will pay you a fixed interest rate every month until the bond expires. In order to raise the money to pay off these fixed interest rates, the US government can either tax its citizens or issue more bonds.
For the past hundreds of years, our government has fulfilled its contracts and paid off the interest on all of its bonds. If we ever neglected to do so (AKA defaulted), it would be MUCH harder for our country to raise money in the future. Also, much of our government's debt is owned by American citizens, so we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, hurting domestic investors, and possibly causing a global economic crash.
That's what's making us pay, not some loan shark knocking on the White House door
In addition to the points you make above, having the world’s most trusted debt also helps to make the US dollar the world’s most stable currency, thus affording the US enormous influence in global fiscal policy. If contracts around the world started getting settled largely in Euros or Yuan, the US would find itself in a much less powerful position at the global negotiating table. As with most things in life, those who control the money have the power.
Well, obviously the US is not going to tell its creditors to go screw themselves. They'll just re-structure the debt in a less favorable for the creditor way. And the latter will agree to that because it has no better options.
That will still tank the economy.. creditors no longer have liquid funds and trust is gone. Any future bond issues will have very interest rates, while the debt now is not actually very large compared to gdp in the U.S and is quite serviceable, if the interest rates become high it will become difficult to service it causing runaway effects and future investments/spending will be hampered leading to all sorts of problems
Your last paragraph is very misleading. While it's true that the US has printed billions of dollars in the last few years, that is not all that significant when you consider that we have trillions in circulation. Also, our inflation rate is far from breathtaking, and has been consistently hovering around 2% a year for decades (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE)
I'm not generally a "don't trust the government numbers" kind of person, but in the case of inflation their numbers are wrong. They don't capture true cost of living changes and the reduction in purchasing power.
The Bloomberg article you linked in reply to another comment about the mis-measurement of CPI was very interesting, but even the alternative measurements discussed in that article estimated inflation to be below 3%.
The Investopedia article discusses how the Fed will reduce their balance sheet, which is actually more or less the opposite of printing money. During the Great Recession, the Fed bought a lot of financial assets (i.e other people's debt) in order to restore faith in the economy and prevent a complete meltdown. Now, they have to decide whether to sell these assets or hold them to their maturity. Regardless of what they choose, they will be receiving cash either in the form of the sale price or dividends.
The Federal Reserve has a mandate to keep inflation rates low, and they generally do a very good job at that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about our national debt, but I wouldn't be too worried about hyperinflation now or in the near future.
There isn't just the cost of a timer, there's also the time and effort that needs to be spent policing your child's screen time. Many families don't have a parent around the house a lot of the time.
These bonds are a contract saying that in exchange for your money today, the US government will pay you a fixed interest rate every month until the bond expires. In order to raise the money to pay off these fixed interest rates, the US government can either tax its citizens or issue more bonds.
For the past hundreds of years, our government has fulfilled its contracts and paid off the interest on all of its bonds. If we ever neglected to do so (AKA defaulted), it would be MUCH harder for our country to raise money in the future. Also, much of our government's debt is owned by American citizens, so we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, hurting domestic investors, and possibly causing a global economic crash.
That's what's making us pay, not some loan shark knocking on the White House door