So we've got a huge public debt and a government which "owns" the rights to significant untapped reserves of a valuable needed resource. How about we (in a public sense) "sell" that resource (by charging royalties to whoever does the drilling, as the current prices will make paying those royalties still profitable) now that prices are quite high and use the proceeds to pay down the debt we've run up?

The combo of paying down our public debt and potentially reducing oil imports, which make up the bulk of our trade deficit would even start to re-strenghten the dollar which would bring down the prices we pay for oil in the long run.

Obviously this is a short-term fix (both for the debt and energy issues) in some ways, and would require an increased level of responsibility on the part of those who make our public spending decisions (and acceptance of that responsibility on the part of those who make the "hiring" decisions), and politically it could never be done by the current administration since some oil company would make money in the deal (which seems to rank just past what's going on in Darfur on the scale of unforgivablility in the minds of their political opponents).