What is the lowest the U.S. Debt could be?

-What do we do with the trillions that are collected for social security, it can't just be put in a bank vault for 40 years and the same for Medicare, so what should the government do with it? Also would a balanced budget mean that buildings and infer structure would be paid in full before they are used? Please dazzle me with your answers.The debt HAS been $0.00. ONLY an IMBECILE would call someone a moron for saying that is the lowest POSSIBLE debt. It is NOT necessary for Social Security, pensions, or other obligations for FUTURE expenditures to represent debt. It is possible (and legally mandatory for private sector pensions), for the liability to be offset by ASSETS sufficient to cover the commitments. Given TRUE fiscal responsibility, debt is NEVER necessary.



On a side issue, the US got along for 150 years or so without Social Security, and we can do it again if INDIVIDUALS start taking responsibility to sae for their own retirement again.
The money collected for S.S. is used to enrich the bank and to pay toward interest on the national debt. We have not paid 1 penny towards the national debt principal in 51 years. The country has been bankrupt since the early 19teens and is surviving on fractional reserve banking and exponential growth- which is not sustainable, so we're screwed in the very near future. Social security, medicare, and other entitlement programs are already operating in the red just like the rest of the government. Have a nice day :-)
It would not need to be put in a bank or anywhere else for 40 years. It is expected to all be spent by sometime in the 2030s. In approximately five years (2016 or 2017?), all the new money collected from social security taxes will be spent immediately on social security benefits, and there will be nothing to save or put in a vault.
$0, Cause that's the lowest amount of money you can have.
It could be Zero
As others have said, theoretically the debt could be zero, but that's not likely to ever happen.



As for Social Security, as I understand the way it works, some of the money paid in today is used to pay to the people currently receiving benefits and the rest theoretically is put in a trust fund to pay for future benefits, but in reality the government, under control of both parties, has been borrowing from that trust fund in order to make it look like the deficit isn't as big as it really is. I think that money's supposed to be paid back, but with the situation as it is now and the unwillingness of many in Washington to put aside party ideology to really solve the problem, I have doubts about whether it ever really will be.



If the money was sitting in the trust fund, that would not count as debt. I think it would be called "reserves" - money set aside for something you know you'll have to pay in the future. The concern with Medicare (and to a lesser extent Social Security) is that as the baby boom generation ages, the percentage of people collecting benefits relative to the number paying into the system is going to grow so there won't be enough money coming in to pay all the benefits promised. That's why it's going to be necessary to either reduce the promised benefits or increase the amount of money being paid into the system (or both). In my opinion, that should have been done 20 years ago. The longer we wait, the more drastic the changes are going to have to be.



The debt is the money owed to people and governments (like China) that have bought Treasury bonds, savings bonds, etc.



A "balanced budget" is different than 0 debt. A balanced budget just means that for a single year, the amount the government spends on everything it does (military, infrastructure projects, social programs, etc.) is equal to the amount of revenue it gets from taxes, fees, etc. A balanced budget would just mean that the debt isn't growing, but what's already there would still be there.



Even with a balanced budget, the government could still borrow money to build bridges. As long as it's paying off an equal amount of the other debts it already has, there would be no net increase in debt.