NATIONAL DEBT & ECONOMIC HEALTH

According to Steve Roth at Angry Bear,  to judge by history, there won't be some economic bliss IF the U.S. paid off all its national debt:

I ask because over four centuries and two centuries respectively (six hundred years combined), the U.K. and the U.S. governments have paid off their debts exactly once: the U.S. in 1836.
This happy event was followed, in 1837, by one of the most catastrophic depressions in either country’s centuries-long history. Likewise, the one other time that the U.S. got close to paying off its debt (the U.K. never has), in 1893, a disastrous depression followed immediately thereon.