How do we pay down the national debt?

[mack]

First of all, what IS the national debt?

I always had the notion that the national debt is largely made up of outstanding federal treasury securities - T-Bills, Bonds - that sort of thing.

If that's the case, we can't force individuals and institutions to cash in their holdings, can we?

If we did manage to get people to cash in their holdings, wouldn't that siphon off a huge amount of money from circulation? IS there a finite amount of money in circulation? How would this work?

I keep hearing this pay down the debt stuff bandied about, but as Inigo Montoya said to Fezzik: "I do not think it means what you think it means".

[Billdo]

Actually, the national debt is mostly in T-Bills, T-Bonds and the like.

The thing is that these treasury securities each have a maturity date, ranging from 3 months to 30 years (I think). When the maturity date hits, the securities are redeemed (or at least stop paying interest).

The government keeps up the national debt by issuing new treasury securities to pay off the ones that are maturing. If the amount of debt is going down, they will just issue fewer new ones than necessary to redeem all of the maturing securites, and if the debt is going up, they will issue more.

This is sort of like rolling your credit cards, but the U.S. Treasury has a much better credit rating than you or I, so it can do this easily.

[Arjuna34]

Some of your questions are answered here:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_163.html

Arjuna34

[conway]

Here is an interesting discussion of the debt (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=44309)

[mack]

Thanks for the links. I figured this has been discusssed before, just didn't know where to look.

[Tedster]

See also http://www.savingsbonds.gov