In response to your question, debt is too high when it is unsupported by the assets on the other side of the balance sheet and the cost to carry it is not affordable.
If you're not going to include assets and income in the discussion, how then can you judge debt levels?
Agreed. Was curious what others thought was a reasonable limit using whatever measure they felt appropriate. I wasn't specific on measures because I didn't want to push any particular type of answer.
When I think of this topic, I tend to consider Debt to GDP ratio. I note some others in this thread also look at this but I didn't note a trend in thinking of a quantifiable level of that measure which would be of significant concern to the group.
I also have no specific Debt / GDP value for concern. The only quantifying criteria I'm personally aware of is the critieria used for countries to adopt the Euro as their currency....I believe they use ~60% Debt/GDP and some very low deficit/GDP as a couple of the criteria of a good economy.
As plotted in ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:...Debt_as_Percent_of_Gross_Domestic_Product.pdf ), our Debt to GDP values are hovering around 100% which is near the our values post WWII. As Gone4Good points out in post 18, the CBO estimates this will get much higher. I'm concerned that our economy as measured by this particular ratio isn't much better than that time period and looking to get much worse. I'd also be less concerned if our debt/GDP was strongly trending downward but don't see that at this point and don't see any stomach in our country today for addressing the debt side of the equation.
I recognize others see things differently and thus asked my questions just to test if others had more specific ideas on when they would be concerned vs not concerned.