What's up with the Government? From a college student's standpoint.

I should introduce myself a bit, call me Kisara. I'm currently going to college after having graduated from high school 3 years ago. When I turned 18, I got a voter registration form in the mail, so I just shrugged my shoulders and filled it out. Not really caring which party I signed up with, I just went with my parents' party. I didn't vote in the last election, mainly because I was to lazy to send in the application for the absentee ballot in my state, I tried, but it probably got there a day late cause I got a response that they had recieved it, but it was too late for my request to be processed, or something of that nature.

Anyway, enough about me. I've been casually paying attention to what's been going on with the healthcare bill and such, but my polisci teacher made it a point to mention the national debt a few weeks back. Hearing the healthcare bill is supposed to cost 1trillion something, I was curious. We have a national debt, and the US is gonna spend more money? That doesn't sound right.

So I googled the National Debt and that brought me to "http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/" which tries to show the national debt up to the second of each day... As of 1:30 PT on Nov 4 (the date I'm typing this) it said the National Debt is $11,982,384,368,274.36... Wait, What? That seems like a heck of a lot of red to me. I've gotten in trouble and had to pay intrest for going under on my debit card, but that was just a few dollars, this is nearly $12 Trillion!!! WTH!!!

If the US debt is that much, why is the government trying to spend more money? I really don't get that. Shouldn't we be trying to fix the debt problem? Or at least bring it under control??? Start paying off some of that debt? Shouldn't that be the main priorety instead of spending even more money? Why is our government doing this?

Everyone go ahead and share your thoughts.