For years, deficit hawks have been groping for ways to shock politicians and the public into getting serious about the skyrocketing federal debt. They hoped they had finally found the right talking point when the United States recently reached a disturbing new milestone: Debt had shot past 100% of gross domestic product.“We’ve heard plenty of alarm bells in the past few years about our fiscal path, but this one rings especially loudly,” wrote the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the organization that calculated the March level of federal debt held by the public as a share of GDP. The like-minded Peterson Foundation called it “an alarming fiscal milestone.” [...]