What makes you think that they have to? Yeah, the public debt is high right now, but as a percentage of GDP, it's less than it was when Eisenhower took office, and it was high then because of a financial recession and a war, too.

The public debt as an absolute number has seldom gone down in recent history. But the absolute number isn't that big a deal. The debt as expressed as a percentage of GDP is much more revealing.

And, actually, paying off the debt results in deflation, not inflation, due to removal of money from the economy. Either one can be bad, of course, but neither is as a matter of course.

Don't get me wrong, our economy isn't in a good state; but the sky isn't falling, either.

On the other hand, one thing in particular does worry me about the public debt, which is the amount of it owned by the Chinese coupled with the artificially low value of the yuan.