Would it though? The government paid for my college then wrote down I own them. They want me to give them that money back eventually. Are they using my promise to borrow money somewhere else? Or is it just an expense for a budget year that gets added as income years later?

Also how much interest have we paid collectively on that 1.5 trillion? If we've paid that much already then what? Can't we just consider it an investment with a negative adjusted return and move on?

In other words macroeconomics doesn't make sense to me in a lot of ways.