Those are good points. Point 2 caught my eye. Because if I was trying to fix it, and this is pure speculation (!) I would want to replace short term gov debt with long term gov debt; remove the short term pressure in the next few years, giving breathing space to sort out the annual overspend; but getting enough buyers could be an issue. However, pension funds and insurers have long term liabilities. So if you make sure from a regs perspective it benefits pension and insurance funds to hold the debt (allow them to discount future liabilities against "safe" US gov debt, plus make sure they never have to mark to market for example) and add in some populist narrative about us all being in it together against an increasingly hostile world; imv you'd have an election winning strategy and a plausible policy objective...