Except when the debt/GDP ratio gets so high that the overall interest payments eat up significant portions of your tax base, meaning the only way to ever improve your debt/GDP ratio is to inflate your way out of it by printing more fiat currency. Which the dangers of have been heartily discussed here and in the world at large.

Strategic borrowing makes sense when going from 0% debt/GDP, but the picture is different when you are already sitting at 100% debt/GDP.

Having interest payments grow faster than tax income is not sustainable.

Even without factoring in the secondary and tertiary effects, and secondary and tertiary arguments revolving around who gets taxed, what the max sustainable tax base could be with higher taxation, what the money gets pent on, how much gets wasted, proper role of govt etc... our current debt/GDP and rate of real economic growth as measured in terms of real wealth production (as measured by production of real goods/marketable services) is already very high.

As far as cuts, I think homeland security and the military should be chopped as well as other services.

Also sinij, FYI I am still working on my response to the productivity/compensation graph you posted some time ago. It has actually been fascinating, I hope to have it finished reasonably soon. Quite a bit of original research going into that (I plan to use it beyond the discussions here), and I just have not had time to complete it. (Havent even played GW2 weekends, literally working 7 days a week the past couple months).

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)