Thew relativizing is something you will mislearn to use soon, becasue the snowball system caused by the enormous costs of future pensioneers you cannot avoid to get overrolled by - except by establishing a police or military dictatorship and supressing the masses uprise with brute force.
LINK: graph
This illustrates the so-called sustainability gap (="Nachhaltigkeitslücke") of the EU states and the US. It is a caluclation done in 2012 on basis of data from 2011. As you can see, the real debt level of the US, Luxembourgh and Ireland, standardized in hundreds and thousand percent of the national GDP, is bigger than that of Greece, Spain or Cyprus.
English link
Later calculations of this type, done at the end of last year and opublished earlier this year, painted even darker pictures for some states. They have the USA at "just" 800%, but have Germany for example at 500% of it's GDP, and put France and Britain much higher, and have - I do not remember the precise ranking, sorry - either Japan or Britain at a whopping 2000%. Will deliver a link when I find it again.
There is a calculation margin, yes, obviously, different models are used, and different data get accepted into the caluclation, for whatever the motives for using these and rejecting other data may be. But one thing should be clear: there is a trend in the conclusions, and these conclusions indicate that the real debts of nations is multiple times higher, 5 times, 8 times, 12 times, 20 times as high as those debts officially allowed to be announced in media propaganda to not upset the masses.
The economic and unemployment news in the media and in press conferences - are just a sedative; the big show and discussion made of these, all that experts' mumbo-jumbo: just an anti-depressant.
Implicit debts, which are closely linked to the sustainability gap, also get called "hidden debts". They in generally describe dimensions that are beyond good or evil and where it does not matter whether you have an economic growth of 0.5 or 5.0% and where it is unimportant whether your unemployment rate is 20%, 8% or 2% - you are facing an avalanche of costs coming at you that will overroll you, no matter wheter you stand or sit or lie flat, yell, or be silent. It does not matter, the avalanche is plowing you under.
Another way to describe this disaster is to calculate by which ammounts the debt burden would be need to be reduced per year over how long a time in order to avoid the worst within the time left. These numbers are not any more encouraging and also allow no optism. To avoid just the worst scenarios to come true, Western nations would need to reduce their total (implict+explicit) debts by yearly amounts of between 5 and something around 20% or 25% (depending on the nation you look at) per each year over the coming next years. As I rcall it, I am not certain, Germany would need to cut debts by around 16% per year, the US 18% or so, but I could be wrong on these numbers. As I recall it, the cuts are the higher the more pressing the debt burden is, naturally. I leave it to your imagination how big the chances are that this will come true, and what this would mean to the social and structural integrity of states, national economies and social systems.
Its all a snowball rolling, turning into a big snowball, turning into a bigger snowball, into a rush, into an avalanche. Snowballing debts get you killed sooner or later. Every time. an economy build on the principle of building on credits, is an economy with an inbuild expiration date. Money printing - is the worst of all capital crimes, it kills not just people - it kills people AND whole nations.