To pay off the National Debt, we'd have to cut government spending to zero fro about 4 years. Proposals of saving a billion here and a hundred million there isn't gonna touch the debt and is simply politics, not actual methodology to pay it off.
If we cut spending by 25%, say a trillion in any given year, and used that to pay down the debt it'd still take about 20 years. But we'd be crippled in that time. In which case the debt would not be our biggest problem any more.
The debt is so large that there's no real way to ever pay it off that doesn't result in taking our own knees out economically. All the debate about the debt is over political maneuvering, not actual solutions to do anything about it. Plus to actually try and do anything about it, the house of cards of very money system is built upon would come crashing down. It wouldn't be a depression, it'd be an apocalypse. And that's not hypoerbole, that's factual reality. The country'd end. Fast and loudly.