This milestone, I believe, is quite immaterial. First and foremost, this is the on balance sheet debt that people are talking about. The US government has lot more liabilities than this $14.3 trillion represents.
If the government did their accounting as US corporations, using US General Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP), the unfunded liabilities would be greater than $100 trillion.
In other words, the US government would have to have today, saved away more than $100 trillion in order to fulfill its financial obligations to creditors, current and future social security retirees, medicare and medicaid recipient, among others.
We can clearly say that the government is bankrupt. But what will the government do? What other governments have done throughout history, that is, debase their currency to pay off their creditors, whether foreign (central banks mostly) or domestic (every worker and retiree in the US).
Outright default is never politically correct, but kicking the can and devaluing the currency is. At the end, when the effects of money printing are felt, governments can always blame goods producers for "creating inflation by raising prices". As the old saying by Ortega & Gasset "When the price of bread rises, the first thing people do is burn down the bakery"
David Walker, the former Comptroller of the US government (The nation's top accountant) clearly explains the unmanageable fiscal outlook. Take a look at this video from 2007:
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