"... everyone's for big government. The American People say we hate big government, but we like our social security and Medicare. That's 38% of government right there. The biggest components of government are the most popular components of government."
"What's pernicious about deficits for conservatives is this. It makes big government cheap. What we're doing, we're turning to the country, the "conservative" administration turns to the country and says: We're going to give you a dollar's worth of government, we're going to charge you seventy five cents for it. And we're going to let your kids pay the other quarter." George Will Nov 30, 2003

I'd love to have it paid off.

But my countrymen are not willing to do the prerequisite belt-tightening.
Paying it off would call for an austerity budget the likes of which, the affects of which few can attest to from personal experience.
Collectively, we don't want to lower our standard of living that far.

So the drunken orgy continues.

You don't want to pay-off debt because then there's less money in the economy. The debt adds about $6 Trillion USD to the US economy that's a HUGE amount of money to be used for growth and etc.

Couldn't a substantially similar argument be made for not ending a heroin addiction?

Any U.S. federal debt is morally bad, in principle, because the ones spending the money are not the ones to whom the money belongs.

It's simply a systematized means to swindle money from the unborn.

Jam a large chef's knife into someone's back, and take $157.34 cents from them, and it's against the law.

Mash a snub-nosed .38 into someone's ribs, and take $29.oo from them, and the police will be after you.

Poke a .45 into somebody's belly, and take their brand new plasma TV (worth $3,000.oo), and you're a criminal.

But run up a $Multi-Trillion $Dollar $debt:

and divide it up amongst the estimated population of the United States, 301,942,302, and we see that each citizen's share of this debt is $29,175.94.

U.S. National Debt Clock

This is an institutionalized injustice which is in some ways more cruel than slavery.
What have I done, to deserve being $30K in debt?!

You are a total lunatic.

That means the average share per person is more than most Americans make in a year... That's terrible.

And getting worse at a rapid rate.

Further, though the ~$29K figure may be the mathematical breakdown, many millions of those are children that don't file income tax.
Many are prisoners, indigent, or for other reasons don't pay income tax.
Eliminate them from the pool of payers, and that substantially increases the burden for those remaining that will pay.

If only half will pay, that means the cost doubles, from nearly $30K, to nearly $60K!

AND
Please bear in mind, we are NOT paying down this debt. We're adding to it.
So all the hundreds of $Billions of dollars we're paying is merely interest. We are not paying down the principle at all.

And just the $interest we're paying is more than we budget for U.S. national defense (or was last time I checked).

$8.8+ $Tril. is not chump change.