What do you mean it works? Its just "passing the buck onto the next generation", credit ratings get downgraded, interest rates on debt go up, countries can't afford to pay back their debt, and they go bust. Its happening all over Europe. What's the size of the US debt. Its got too many zeros for me to count ...
It "gets us out of jail" aka it works. I was commenting on the expression you used. Credit rating is a pretty silly argument since these are the same companies that rated completely insolvent companies as AAA. As far as European countries not being able to pay back their debts, they voluntarily gave up monetary sovereignty, the US has not. I was too young at the time to be that interested in the advent of the Euro, and not European enough to deeply learn the reasoning and history behind it, but it certainly seems like hindsight and foresight should have been 20/20 on that one. Any country that runs a trade deficit consistently is going to go bankrupt under the Euro. It is an inevitability unless they get bailed out.
As far as the US debt, again the US has a sovereign money supply and it cannot go bankrupt except by choice. All a high Debt:GDP ratio means is that the government is far too bloated for the peoples' good.