Read Restructuring United States Government Debt: Private Rights, Public Values, and the Constitution:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...

A staggering and climbing national debt soaring past $30 trillion is the wage of the American Empire.
Empires bankrupt. The $1.5 trillion U.S. annual imperial expenditure is a dead weight on the economy: no consumer goods; the migration of human genius from production to proficiency in killing; staggering inefficiencies from monopolies and cost-plus contracts; unaudited books, secrecy, and an absence of congressional oversight which balloon fraud and mismanagement.
University of Virginia’s Edmund W. Kitch and Julia Mahoney are sounding the alarm: Americans urgently need to start thinking about the unthinkable: How do we deal with the United States going bankrupt?
In a groundbreaking paper, Professors Kitch and Mahoney lay out their plan for a Chapter 11-style debt restructuring for the federal government. The conventional wisdom is wrong in believing $30 trillion will (and must) be paid in full and on time. Kitch and Mahoney show that restructuring is both legally and politically possible. They reject the view that the Constitution requires that the United States pay all of its formal debts before allocating resources to other claimants. They believe the gridlock that comes with separation of powers provides a credible assurance in the stability of the bankruptcy-like restructuring.
Let's never forget that the coming financial crisis can be cured by replacing our empire with the Constitution’s foreign policy of invincible self-defense that prevailed for more than a century. Budget surpluses (with no income tax) were the norm from 1880 to the ill-conceived Spanish-American War in 1898.