Silly headline. A record amount of debt has to of course have a record amount of interest to cover it. Ditto next year, the year after ......................
To avoid confusing yourself, you should stop calling our expansion of private sector money, "debt". Expansion of money is necessary due mainly to growth in private sector productivity (worldwide!) Expansion at too high a rate necessitating a higher rate of Treasury security issuance may be partly due to, in the U.S. at least, our chronic failure to tax appropriately. Your long range concern re servicing of Treasury Securities may be well-founded. Whether it is, or not, is a topic on which there are differences of opinion among MMT economists, who are the only economists we should listen to on sovereign money matters. In this regard, we should definitely not listen to our parents, because nearly everything they taught us about how government finances work is nonsense. There is practically nothing government finances have in common with private sector finances. Our parents did not know this!
I am intrigued by your sentence above. After ~15 years of concentrated study of the work of the MMT economists I have finally plumbed down to its essence: All the transactional money we use in the private sector comes from deficits. "Wealth" is too broad a word here, but if we bone- headedly use the word to mean "money", then we would have no money (at least no government money) without deficits. In that sense, "deficits are the source of 'wealth'."
Trivial news. American debt / GDP is very low. Japan's debt / GDP is the world's highest. And the Japanese are not even bothered by it.
My parents taught me that money borrowed and owed is ... debt. Stop with the silly we don't owe because we print, print, print. Or at least stop foolishly trying to dissuade others from correctly referring to it as debt. My parents were right.
Your parents confused, just as mine did, their finances with that of governments. Eventually, reality triumphs over fiction's beguiling seduction.
MMT allows the government to cancel student debt, provide UBI, aid marginalized communities, deliver reparations, ... at no consequence. Those arguing against utopia are doomers gloomers. We print money to pay debt, to pay for stuff, to pay for printing machines, ... Not sure why some cannot understand that.