I'm not interested in "what people in the industry think", I'm interested about data.

If we look at the US debt in terms of GDP percentage points, it has remained steady from 1970 to 1980, then it jumped from <40% of GDP to >60% in 1995.

It did not decrease at all during the eighties: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/government-debt--of-nominal-gdp

Then it slightly went back down from 1995 to 2000 before jumping to 120% in 2023, especially after 2008.

Note that while I am comparing in nominal terms, it's likely that the debt to GDP ratio would be bigger in real terms since inflation was much bigger than what they actually reported, as you specified yourself.

So, how do we fix the debt burden?

You can't really increase taxes when people don't have enough money at the end of the month, unless:

You provoke deflation by keeping rates high and energy prices low OR

You increase taxes on the mega rich but then the mega rich leave which hurts the economy more than it helps.

You could decrease interest rates to stimulate the economy, tax more, and repay your debt but then you absolutely cannot use the money to increase your national debt even more -> hardly doable.

The only rational and sustainable way to decrease the debt would be to increase GDP growth faster than the debt.

For that, you need to increase productivity per capita, or the number of people working, which, when you have a demographic pyramid in V shape, is hardly doable unless you resort to (qualified) mass immigration, which also almost never worked in the history of mankind.

Finally, as I wrote in the conclusion, the West is not going bankrupt as long as it can print itself out of it. But given everything I have written above, I don't believe we'll be able to do that for long with abyssimal governmental and fiscal balance deficits.