Our natoinal debt

All nhis talk about the fiscal cliff and th edebt had me thinking about some things that I never really seemed addressed.

1. Is it possible to ever pay this off? Or even to get it manageable? I'm not an expert, but 16 trillion dollars seems like a lot of money. So much money that I don't think it's remotely possible to ever get this under control.

2. Where do we keep getting money from? I don't know the exact numbers, but I think the US is barrowing roughly 4 billion a day. Again, that seems like a lot of money. Who would keep lending us money? Do they really think we're ever in a millions years going to be able to pay them back? What if our lenders just decided to stop lending to us? Are they going to ask for California or Florida to settle up?

3. Is it possible to stop borrowing? To work on the debt means we would have to live with a balanced budget. If we are barrowing almost half our money that means we would have to cut half of our expenses. The military, Social Security, Medicaid, salaries for govornment employees. That just seems so unlikely to ever happen. I don't think it's possible to raise taxes to cover even a small part of this.