I liked what Bill Clinton said about the national debt at the 2012 Democratic Convention. (Here is a transcript of his speech.)

Now, let’s talk about the debt. Today, interest rates are low, lower than the rate of inflation. People are practically paying us to borrow money, to hold their money for them.

But it will become a big problem when the economy grows and interest rates start to rise. We’ve got to deal with this big long- term debt problem or it will deal with us. It will gobble up a bigger and bigger percentage of the federal budget we’d rather spend on education and health care and science and technology. It — we’ve got to deal with it.

I like this passage in his speech because he is careful to discuss the fact that interest rates are temporarily low, something I discussed in my post “What To Do When the World Desperately Wants to Lend Us Money.”