[kaesar14]

I don't think it's 'awful' for a person to live in debt. The richest Americans have loads of debt. A significant part of the American Dream is to own a house which is essentially debt. Perhaps the argument is more about whether the US government is drowning in debt more akin to CC debt (bad debt) or mortgage debt (good debt) but in the abstract, leverage is a perfectly fine thing for a government to use in order to fund its development.

[nxm]

Debt is also how economies and a lot of companies grow

[HideousKojima]

They could also grow by saving and reinvesting surpluses/profits

[scatters]

No, they couldn't. One person's savings is another person's debt. If everyone tries to save then no one can; this is the paradox of thrift.

[HideousKojima]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift#Criticisms

Just because someone gives it a formal name doesn't mean it's true.

>One person's savings is another person's debt.

Only if you treat fiat currency (or bank deposits in general, the paradox you mention was formulated long before we got off the gold standard) as the only possible form of savings.

[scatters]

Sticking gold in a vault is only a means to saving if you have a reasonable expectation that when you take it out you can use it to obtain goods and services. It is thus a disguised claim on future production, and so relies on debt to exactly the same degree as bank money.

[intotheabyss]

The entire point of debt is to bring future revenue to the present so that you don't have to wait for savings to trickle in every year.

[HideousKojima]

At the cost of some portion of your future revenue

[airstrike]

and if that future revenue is N times greater than you would otherwise get without debt, then it's still better to take on debt.

Would you rather have 90% of $1M or 100% of $800k?

[HideousKojima]

>if

That single word is doing all of the heavy lifting for you. "If" the housing market will never crash, then it's a surefire safe investment! Better buy tons of houses to flip on credit. There's no guarantee that your debt/investment will succeed, which is why banks try (and often enough, fail) to price in risk with things like varying interest rates, collateral, etc.

[grotorea]

AFAIK the standard economic opinion is that this is suboptimal and leads to underinvestment.

[logicchains]

The American dream is to "own" a house, not to own a mortgage.

[anon291]

You do not own a mortgage. You have sold a mortgage.