Governments really aren’t in this whole “staying afloat” business either, that’s a corporate perspective as well.

Governments make the rules entirely, so they can be indebted to their citizens, their corporations, and even other governments and be totally fine.

They realistically need to have some sort of pathway to be chipping at their debts, but many can go into much deeper debt to churn out social programs that add value back to their economies in the long term.

For instance a country could go into debt so all their citizens could have free access to schooling and college, and it would be net positive for that country because the those citizens could contribute more towards the economy than they could without that free education.

Another example is paying for bullet trains, nuclear power plants, solar energy panels, etc. are all worth the investment and worth going into debt for since they add so much value back to economies and open up new jobs.

The one caveat I’ll give is in the cases where countries are literally printing more currency rather than borrowing. Countries need to be borrowing money, even from themselves. They can’t just print more to pay it off, without that money being backed by labor.

In small cases it’s fine or healthy to print more money, but it’s a horrible move to just print more money to pay off all your debts if you want to still be able to trade with other countries in the future.

I actually think government should be in some amount of debt as it means they are actively building new stuff for the people but also like only a little and because of infrastructure development not just military budget bloom for billion dollar planes that dont get built.