We probably shouldn't go there, but I'll just say that $17 trillion and rising (a trillion is truly an almost unimaginable number) deficit is and should be very scary. (And it's both parties' fault.)
It really shouldn't be. If you look at the "national debt" as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, it's smaller than the "national debt" England had in the 19th century when it was running the world. And England theoretically had to pay its debts in gold -- which we don't, not since the 1930s. (In practice, England didn't either.)
The problem is actually the use of "debt"; one of the points of John Maynard Keynes, which has been reiterated by a group promoting what is known as "Modern Monetary Theory", is that "debt" doesn't really make much sense as a concept for a government which prints money.
The only actual problem with the debt is that it is interest-bearing -- the interest on the debt is the only real issue. Instead of issuing interest-bearing bonds to rich people, the government should actually print money, which is exactly like debt except that it doesn't pay interest. At the moment, the interest rates on government bonds are very close to zero, so it makes little difference, but it matters if interest rates go up. The concept of funding the government by printing money is ancient and is called "seignorage" in the jargon of the accountants and economists.
There is a limit to the ability to print money, but we are nowhere near that limit, and we will be nowhere near that limit as long as we don't hit a real resource shortage.
For instance, if everyone who wants to is employed, or if we can't run our factories without more oil (as happened in the 1970s), or if there's a massive crop failure and we run out of food, then we have to stop printing money and start shredding it. We are not anywhere near that situation, with high unemployment, a "general glut" of most resources, and factories which are successfully shifting off of oil-dependence.
There's a whole mess of stuff I learned about this by a deep dive into 200 years of economics research over the last couple of years. It's not actually as complicated as it sounds, but I won't claim that it's intuitive, because it isn't. Most people have never been in a position where they could personally print money, so it's hard to understand what things are like if you're the government.
The question of what the government should actually do with the money is another one; I am not at all happy with the government's priorities ($1 trillion/year on the military, scraps for Amtrak), since I think a bunch of these decisions make us all worse off. But that's a question of resource allocation, of priorities. It should be separate from the question of money.
