Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is one of the most commonly known and accepted measures of an economy's health.  GDP is defined as:

GDP = consumption + investment + government + exports minus imports

or

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)

There are many arguments against using GDP as a valid measure and they can be fodder for future posts, but right now I want to focus on the government component (G).

For the past four years, the government has been running around $3.8 Trillion per year in spending, which directly adds to GDP.  At the same time, approximately $1.1 Trillion per year has been in added debt.  The problems to this are fairly simple.  All expenditures by government, no matter how trivial or wasteful, directly add to the G component and therefore GDP.  So if government pays people to move dirt from one place to another, this will count as an addition to GDP.  When, not if, the government reduces its deficit from $1.1 Trillion to something less, this amount will directly reduce GDP and in fact will cause even further reduction in knock-on effects, such as base closures that translated into 2-1 job losses for each job loss.

When people are crowing about the growth in GDP of 2% to 3%, it is never mentioned that 1/15th of GDP is simply government debt, which completely dwarfs that supposed growth.