Are you tired of the panic-button pushers? In the last month we’ve lived through two trumped-up predictions of disaster. One was that our debt is so high that we’re about ready to go bankrupt—not true, but it caused the debt ceiling ridiculousness. The other was when Standard & Poor’s reduced America’s credit rating, and the markets went haywire.

Hmmm.

I’m suspecting a bit of theatre here. Some people get their jollies from panic. It’s high emotion. Disaster looming? How entertaining. And the news hole? After Casey Anthony left town, there was nothing for the media to cover, so something had to emerge to keep the adrenalin flowing.

So the S&P filled the slot. Never mind that the S&P is drama itself. They gave Iceland a triple-A rating as it was going belly up. That should cement our confidence in them.

Curiously, when everyone took their money out of the stock market, they put the proceeds into U.S. Treasuries, which were the exact investments that had been downgraded.

But amid all the brou-ha-ha, I began to wonder about the debt. I wasn’t concerned about it. Schooled by the writings of Paul Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith—which gives you some idea of my age—I thought that’s what governments took on when recession lurked about. Silly me.

Then the Republicans began crowing that the U.S. should be like American families and control its debt. That made them think they sounded so wise. But I’m wary of such platitudes. I decided to take a look at American families.

So here is one such family—let’s call them the Browns, the fifth most common surname in America. Let’s compare their finances with America’s.

Let’s say the Browns’ income is $65,000, the median family income in Massachusetts. According to an online calculator, they can afford a mortgage of about $300,000, so we’ll assume that’s their total. They have two cars, and could easily have $20,000 combined debt on them. Then they still have their student loans, which could total around $20,000 for each of them, since that’s the median debt among graduating bachelor’s degree recipients in 2008, according to a web sites that track these things. They have credit cards, and average estimates here range from about $7,000 to $15,000 per household. So we’ll put the Browns in the middle at $11,000. They’re up around $400,000 of debt—six times their income. And let’s bet they have no savings.

Most of us would probably say that, while they have significant debt—except for the credit card, about which we know nothing—their decision to take on that debt is wise. Their house and college loans were investments in their future. Their cars enable them to get to work.

So America doesn’t look so bad after we’ve looked at a typical family. Economists like to measure these things by comparing GDP to the debt, and things look good if we do it that way. But even if we compare the national debt about $14 trillion to tax revenue of about $2.2 trillion, we’re still at about seven times income—about the same as the Browns.

Just as the Browns might get promotions or better jobs and raise their income, so can America. I’ve talked to no one recently in downtown Boston who makes more than $250,000—some a lot more—who thinks he or she shouldn’t pay more in taxes. And some of them are Republicans. Maybe it is just that my friends have more community spirit than some people.

But they also might have more confidence in America than the ranting Republicans.

I saw what we could do about debt in the 1990s. I worked for an organization of professional and executive women meeting in Washington. To their conference came Robert Reich, Laura Tyson, and Robert Rubin, the newly arrived Clinton Administration’s top financial people.

They told the gathering how they were going to bring down the national debt. And then over about six years, they did it.

I believe in American ingenuity, just like those financial wizards exercised. I’m ashamed of the Tea Baggists’ attitude that our country doesn’t deserve such investments as roads, high speed rail, health care, education, space exploration and all the other things that prepare us for the next few decades. We are a smart group of people, who can invest in our infrastructure, protect our most vulnerable, and lay the groundwork for health and prosperity for decades to come.

We won’t get there, however, with trumped-up panic attacks, fake economics and the sorry lack of confidence in our abilities that some policy-makers show.