Today's broadcast, "Who's afraid of the big bad debt?", going up shortly. Let me share a couple of slides that may also be relevant to today's column 1/ krugmantoday.com
First, when people ask how we'll pay back the debt incurred as we respond to Covid-19, or suggest that debt over 100 percent of GDP would be disastrous, consider the history of the UK in the mid-20th century 2/ 
Britain emerged from World War II with debt of more than 250 percent of GDP. It didn't have a debt crisis. And it never paid off that debt, just rolled it over. However, debt as a share of GDP eroded as the economy grew. 3/
CBO currently projects debt by the end of next year of 108 percent of GDP. How hard would that be to deal with? Bear in mind that interest rates have consistently been below the economy's growth rate, so that with primary (non-interest) balance, the debt ratio would fall 4/
Two scenarios: primary balance, and a primary deficit of 2% of GDP, which is roughly where we were before the 2017 tax cut. In both cases I assume interest rate 1% below growth rate. Deficit scenario would lead to gradually rising debt ratio 5/
But the operative word is "gradually": even by the year 2050 the US debt ratio would be lower than that in Britain for much of the 20th century. The point is that we shouldn't panic about debt; we have lots of running room, and won't need extreme measures to contain it 6/
