I think you are mostly considering just the $8-$9 trillion in Current Debt. The boomers are starting to retire now, that's about $50+ trillion payout. We CANNOT ramp up to pay that. Not in an energy decreasing world with it's Deflationary experience.

We have already past the Event Horizon on debt, and we CANNOT repay it.

It's eventually will be called Soverign Default.

Or as the Phoenix as the Amero ?

At this point, the debt is so large that if we were to start paying down the debt as soon as Bush is ousted, using the same rate at which we are currently creating debt, it would take us about 18 years to pay it off

So?

Paying off debt over decades isn't necessarily a problem - (responsible) homeowners have been doing that with their mortgages for decades.

More importantly, though, why is it necessary to pay the debt to zero? The US government borrows money at a remarkably low rate of interest - 5% - so it can be cost-effective to borrow, provided the money is spent to create more wealth than is needed to pay it off.

The US government's debt is at about 65% of GDP now, which is a very reasonable number by historical as well as international terms. Interest payments on the debt are at a multi-decade low as a fraction of tax receipts, which themselves are fairly low. Looked at objectively, it's really not that big of a deal.

With all the demands placed on the budget by the baby boomers

Those "demands" come almost exclusively from assuming that medical expenses will continue to rise as fast as they have been. They can't - we can't afford it - so they won't.

Paul Krugman has written fairly extensively about this. The basic point is that healthcare in the US is monstrously expensive and inefficient, and fixing that will largely fix the problem.