The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitude being sown.
Until it can't. It's an interesting gambit because while carrying high levels of debt is easier to do during periods of low interest, the second-order effect of taking on that debt is the pain it'll bring you to service it when interest rates rise.
Unless you have certainty on future economic conditions (which nobody does), it's prudent to cap your debt level such that can be paid down within a relatively short time frame. That way when tough times inevitably arrive, you have an escape plan. But even then, enacting that escape plan (paying off the debt) causes a shockingly sudden lack of available funds to go anything else (i.e. austerity).
This doesn't mean debt, well-applied, isn't a hugely valuable tool. Provided it's used for investment in suitable force multipliers (infrastructure) that help ensure your future ability to service the debt, and profit beyond. But infrastructure isn't well funded and there doesn't seem to be suitable proposals to make it happen, so if debt's not being increased towards that end....
It already couldn't, thus monetary easing (aka, inflation, aka increasing the money supply). Governments always default on their debts through inflation. In the US it was called "QE"
Without QE, the treasury auctions would have yielded higher rates of borrowing for the feds. Instead, QE pushed the yields down and money rushed into risk assets (stock market). We're in uncharted economic territory. How do we unwind? Right now, they're slowly letting the balance sheet shrink, but not significantly.
The Federal Reserve didn't seem very comfortable using QE, but felt it was needed due to the depth of the crash. We were lucky we didn't have a repeat of the 25% unemployment of the 1930's. There's no law of nature that says all slumps are repairable. When things get bad enough, the masses rise up and demand socialism, because "average" socialism is usually better than crashed capitalism. Eating bland food and standing in line is better than death.
Until it can't. It's an interesting gambit because while carrying high levels of debt is easier to do during periods of low interest, the second-order effect of taking on that debt is the pain it'll bring you to service it when interest rates rise.
Unless you have certainty on future economic conditions (which nobody does), it's prudent to cap your debt level such that can be paid down within a relatively short time frame. That way when tough times inevitably arrive, you have an escape plan. But even then, enacting that escape plan (paying off the debt) causes a shockingly sudden lack of available funds to go anything else (i.e. austerity).
This doesn't mean debt, well-applied, isn't a hugely valuable tool. Provided it's used for investment in suitable force multipliers (infrastructure) that help ensure your future ability to service the debt, and profit beyond. But infrastructure isn't well funded and there doesn't seem to be suitable proposals to make it happen, so if debt's not being increased towards that end....