We should also never forget how "the magic of compound interest" grows debt faster than any productive economy can pay it off:
http://store.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Killing-The-Host_PDF_V7.pdf (P.42)
"A lily pod is placed in a pond.
"Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double.
"On the thirtieth day the pond is covered completely by lily pods, which can grow no more.”
"'On which day was the pond half full and half empty?
"The twenty-ninth day,' that is, one day before the half the pond’s lilies double for the final time, stifling its surface.
"The end to exponential growth thus comes quickly."
The US economy (pond) is close to its day 29, and neither major political party mentions the role played by the exponential growth of debt.
When it comes to government debt, it's a bit more complicated than that. At some points debt is extremely cheap, such that even very modest GDP growth will outpace it.
For example, there was a point as recently as last summer when the rate on a 10-year Treasury was just 1.40%. And there was a long stretch between mid-2011 and mid-2013 when it was typically less than 2.0%. With interest rates that low, the economy is going to be outgrowing debt nearly every month -- as long as you're not running substantial deficits, you'll tend to grow your way out of debt.
You can see how that works in historical terms. Back in 1946, thanks to all the borrowing we did to finance WWII, debt was 118.9% of GDP. Over the next 35 years, debt fell as a share of GDP nearly every year, despite us generally running deficits in those years. The deficits tended to be small enough that the rise in nominal debt was outpaced by the growth of the economy. By 1981, debt was only 31.7% of GDP. However, that was the year of the fiscally catastrophic Reagan tax cuts. That crippled revenue growth, reversing the 35-year trend of shrinking debt burden.
By the time Clinton took office, debt was back up to 64.0% of GDP, and rising. But Clinton pushed through a tax hike, revenues started growing in a healthy way again, and debt soon started heading back down -- 54.6% in 2001. Unfortunately, that was the year Bush repeated Reagan's disastrous fiscal experiment, with another round of reckless upper-class taxes. Thus, by the time of Bush's last budget, debt was back up to 82.4% of GDP, and it has continued upward since then (though the rise slowed a great deal following the 2013 tax hike).
So, we don't need to be irrationally afraid of debt. But we do need a plan for dealing with it. The mainstream economic view is that the way for a nation to manage debt is to run large deficits during and immediately following recessions, then balanced or surplus budget when times are good, to allow the economy to grow relative to the size of the debt, lessening the burden over time. That's basically the formula we followed to take debt down from 118.9% of GDP to 31.7% of GDP in 35 years, between WWII and the rise of Reagan. Unfortunately, Trump would rather ignore that success and instead try to emulate the spectacular failures of Reagan and Bush.
