Let's also keep in mind the population is still growing so just like the game of "Highest grossing movie of all time!" title you see every year, it's not surprising at all that total debt numbers are increasing. We need debt per capita to be alarmed.

The debt is real, the wealth not necessarily. But a more telling measure would be debt per capita or debt vs liquid assets. The financial crisis showed us that 20 trillion can be erased relatively quickly. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/financial-crisis-co...

The debt is as "real" as the assets. All it would take to erase a good chunk of it is for people to stop paying or for significant inflation to occur, among many other possibilities.

Edit: I'm not trying to suggest some kind of Fight Club-esque reorganization of society's financing structures. I'm just talking about the way that debt tends to get fractionally charged off when it goes to collections.

I wonder what the NCAV of the US is?

You are conflating consumer debt, i.e., hold by consumers, with asset wealth, which is hold mostly by corporations and their owners. The first is usually carried by the poorest part of the population, since rich people have little need for consumer debt.