Paying down the National Debt -- here's my thoughts. Any better ideas?

I’m an old man now, and I have no fantasies of ever running for office, not even for dog catcher. So I am going to tell you young people some politically incorrect facts that you don’t want to hear, but you jolly well better listen, because you need to know these facts. NOW HEAR THIS:

We are in for some serious hard times. The current National Debt is thanks to Reaganomics, as the chart here clearly illustrates. Let’s not lay it all at Obama’s feet. There’s blame aplenty for Democrats and Republicans—and for We the People who keep voting to get free stuff here and self-financing tax cuts there. But the net result is that we can pay the debt off today. Every man, woman and child in America needs to simply send the IRS a check for $45,527.00 and we will suddenly be debt free—that’s if all the checks are good. Alternatively, every single tax filer can send in a check for $127,675.00 and take care of this.

Here’s the reality, free from all this right vs. left hatefest idiocy that keeps us focused on DOING NOTHING MEANINGFUL about it. We’ve played “don’t tax, just spend” since 1980. Our debt is nearing 100% of our GDP. It was 120% of GDP after WWII, and we paid it down then with taxes as high as 92% on the highest income brackets. But times were different then. The war left the manufacturing capacity of the entire developed world in a shambles, with the exception of the USA. We retooled our war manufacturing and started building cars, ships, refrigerators, bicycles, clothes, shoes—everything the deprived world needed. We sold our goods everywhere. And we paid down the debt.

Today, we don’t have a devastated world that only we can supply. We can either invest in the technologies of the 21st century to get out of this, or just go through a VERY long, very deep depression. We would need to cut spending by over $2 trillion a year to start paying down the national debt. We CANNOT cut spending that deeply without producing a depression that will take decades to resolve.

It is NONSENSE to say cutting $2 trillion in spending would leave that $2 trillion in people’s pockets. Horse manure. Only cutting taxes $2 trillion would do that, and that would make the debt pile up more than twice as fast. It’s time to get real, people. Quit the stupid finger pointing and deal with reality instead of political polemics. If someone has an idea for a painless way out of this, I am all ears.