Your analysis starts by excluding any taxes you find inconvenient (such as, apparently, social security, inflation, tariffs, ad-valorem taxes, and especially state and local taxes -- which you somehow don't regard as governments) to get the numbers you want. If a business did accounting the way you just did, they'd rightfully land in jail.

I had assumed the OP was talking in terms of the federal government, as that is the government debt that is most criticized. Also, did state and local taxes not exist in 2000? I would assume the tax and spending ratios would be close to the same.

Also, if the government got to do accounting the way businesses do, then they would be able to capitalize things like infrastructure costs. But because our governments can't, transportation funds dry up and we end up with decaying infrastructure.

You seem to suggest I'm being deceiving here, but all I'm pointing out is this: We had a recession caused by the private sector. As a result of this recession, tax revenue went down, because taxes go down in a recession. Spending also went up, because spending on safety net programs intended to mitigate recessions goes up. And certain people, like yourself apparently, think this is an unprecendented catastrophe. And our long-run debt projections are almost purely a function of healthcare costs and have nothing to do with aging or population trends.

You fail to mention who's going to pay it then? It must wonderful to be an Entitled One and write checks that someone else has to cash.

Where is it written that a country is required to eventually reduce it's national debt to $0? The US will not "die" and leave a bunch of credit card bills to its heirs, like human being. China is not going to knock on our door, throw a bunch of IOUs in our faces, and demand we pay up or they'll break our legs. The figurative way this could happen is if our debt causes expensive borrowing costs or massive inflation. Why don't we wait for either of those to start to happen -- none of which has happened in countries with much greater debt than US that control their own currency (as we do), like Japan -- before you throw the "future burden of our kids" argument out?

Even then the government was obviously bloated beyond all recognition, with government "jobs" that required little or no work being handed out as political favors.

I posted this link down below, but public sector employment has completely collapsed since the recession[0]. So, I can't imagine too many jobs are being handed out this way.

Greece had multiple problems, and yes, government corruption was one of them. It also has no control of a central bank to increase/decrease the money supply. Its government does not also does not possess roughly $100 trillion in asssets[1]. I don't like the idea of selling Yellowstone to Disney (for example) in the face of fiscal deficits, but if you're going to make the "future generations" argument, it's more accurate to compare the government debt to government assets than the government's tax receipts in a single year.

[0] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/american-austeri...

[1] http://business.time.com/2013/02/05/the-federal-governments-...