It's worth another quick mention that this idea of the government 'borrowing' isn't quite what people think it is. First of all it's not like taking a loan where you're constantly paying out interest. They take in cash and have to pay out cash at some later interval, sometimes 10 or 30 years away. And that's inflated money. So consider a 30 year treasury at 3% interest, in a 3% inflationary environment. And no, I don't agree that inflation for the past 15 years has been 2%, regardless of what the official reports say. Well in this scenario in real dollar terms the 'borrowing' costs you nothing, and meanwhile you inject cash into the system now that creates real results and helps the actual local (and international) economy. Furthermore, even if the real cost of borrowing was in fact positive, money today is still worth more than money + 1-2%/annual years from now. That should be obvious to anyone who noticed that everyone levered up during the pandemic when rates were very low. If the government could borrow at 1% real value (in a low interest environment) then they should! They should just do it on principle. Most people who are into finance would do the same, and it wouldn't be unsound. It's a fixed rate value, the interest on it can't go up once the bond is sold. Now it becomes a separate matter if the interest environment is expensive; then you need to do a bunch of math to see whether it's good to have more valuable dollars now at X face value and a 1.05X debt to pay in 10 years. And you have to factor in things like fixing some infrastructure now will cost Y, but will cost 1.5Y if left another 10 years and has worse problems, along with the inflation that goes along with it.
Now obviously I'm simplifying a little to demonstrate something, which is that borrowing is unsound if it creates unsustainable debts that end up bankrupting you. And that's for people who have to service the debt monthly, which is not how treasury bonds work (3-month bills are a different story). But the more I learn about these things the more I realize how foolish it is to sit on a basic idea like 'borrowing bad', which is the mentality of my grandparents' generation. If borrowing is bad then I guess you should give away your house with a mortgage on it, right? Obviously it's not bad...unless it's bad. It's on a case by case basis. Borrowing can be the key to wealth and success, it can bury you if you do it wrong, like most things in life. Government borrowing, as it turns out, has been a boon to all that has mostly gone unrecognized as far as I can tell.