What is the national debt and the complexities surrounding it?

It is simple enough to tell you what the national debt is, but it is not possible to know what complexities your professor has discussed in class or what sorts of essay questions he might ask about them.  I would strongly advise that you consult your class notes and/or talk to your professor and any TA you might have.

The national debt is the accumulated money that the United States owes as a country.  When we talk about the national debt, we need to differentiate it from the national deficit.  The deficit is the amount which government revenues fall short of spending in a given year.  The debt is the accumulation of all prior years’ deficits (less a very few years when we had government surpluses). 

That much is straightforward and does not depend on anything that your professor has said.  However, the complexities surrounding the debt have very much to do with what your Professor Hampson has discussed in class.  One complexity might be the fact that different amounts of the debt are owed to different people.  Some of the debt is owed to domestic sources and some to foreign sources.  Those parts of the debt have very different implications for the US.  Another complexity could be the fact that some people believe that it is good to have a debt.  If we could not have a debt, we would lack flexibility to engage in fiscal policy during recessions and we might have a hard time doing things like waging unexpected wars.  Another complexity might be the debate over whether debt “crowds out” private borrowing or whether it actually helps us by creating things like infrastructure that pay off over the long term.  Another complexity might be the difficulty of dealing with the debt when our deficits are so large and so much of our deficit spending is driven by entitlements rather than by discretionary spending that can be cut relatively easily.  All of these are possible complexities about the national debt.  It is very important that you find out which of these complexities have been addressed in your textbook or in class sessions.