You hear about our nation’s debt all the time. How it’s ruining our economy. How it weights down future generations. How the most important thing we could do is cut down on spending even if that means layoffs of public sector employees, even if it means a smaller investment in education, even if it means letting infrastructure and environmental problems fester. Sure, our children might have a debt clock with a lower number, but without investment in education they may not be able to compete in the global marketplace.

Here are five facts to keep in mind:

Most of the money we owe, is to ourselves. It’s true we owe money to foreigners but that only accounts for about 34 percent of the pie. The rest is what we owe ourselves: US Individuals and Institutions, US Social Security Trust Fund, and the U.S. Military Retirement Fund. So comparing our national borrowing to that of a family with a too-big mortgage or six maxed-out credit cards is a like comparing a dog to a cat or a pear to a grape. It might work if a man loaned money to his wife from their bank account to buy a car so she could get to work and because the job she now had transportation to was many hundred times the number of the money they took from their checking account…The point is, the US economy is way too complex to compare it with that of a family.

In WWII we owed a much greater percentage of our GDP than we do today. We never paid that debt back. Our economy grew so big that the debt we owed, mostly to ourselves, became irrelevant. And all that debt didn’t hamstring the economy because our country experienced years of robust growth after the war.

Yes, we owe money to other nations, including China, Japan and Brazil, but they owe us money too. And we actually earn more from our assets abroad than we pay to foreign investors.

Great Britian has had a debt exceeding 100 percent of its GDP for the last 81 of 170 years. And while this isn’t an ideal situation, it hasn’t been catastrophic. It’s important for any nation to strive for a low debt-to-GDP ratio, but it’s not more important than fixing our bridges and roads and it certainly isn’t more important than investing in education, which yields dividends for decades to come. Let’s keep the debt down, but let’s not keep our country down in the process.

Something to Celebrate

Our deficit is falling, which means we’re moving in the right direction. In 2009 our deficit was just over 10.2% of our GDP. This year it fell to 4.2% of our GDP.