Paying the debt off is just paying for the bureaucratic slush fund we've been providing for the last 30 years!! Do you think these drunken sailor politicians are going to stop wasting our money anytime soon? They'll just see the reduced debt as an opportunity to blow more of our money! It should be a damn percentage of taxes we've paid over the last X number of years we get back, not some arbitrary flat rate for everyone OR better yet, pass a real bill that completely overhauls the tax system and does away with the IRS completely that helps us claw our money back over time with heavily reduced taxes.