Money is the way we divide up the productive capacity of a country. To become richer as a nation, you increase the productive capacity of a country, you don't collect little pieces of paper.
Debt is not money though, debt is a future claim on some portion of that output and that claim is to the whole comingled basket of productive capacity that took out the debt so in a country's case itis a claim on all of it because a country can income tax and/or wealth tax up to 100 % of the income/wealth. So a coubtry can get richer by increasing capacity more than the claim on capacity or it can decrease the claim on capacity freeing up output for the country.
Which is why who holds the debt is more important than the existence of the debt. If the government owes the money to a pension fund that's a good thing. If they owe it to a foreign adversary, it's not.
Thats just not true at all. If the debt was incurred inveating in s(mething thatcpays higher yields than tge debt service or possibly inlfation cost it may be a good thing. If its mallinvested or wasted on current consumption its a bad thing in almost all instances. Who holds it is only relevant as far as what sort of financial damage they can do selling it off.
What I said is a subset of what you are claiming and it's the actually true part. There are lots of investments that increase productive capacity that are bad on pretty much any sane metric (i.e bridges to nowhere, sweetheart deals for new professional sports stadium construction, speculative factory subsidies, especially in rapidly evolving technology fields like the travesty that happened in solar panel manufacture a few years ago).
No you said "s(mething thatcpays higher yields than tge debt service or possibly inlfation cost"
That's nowhere close to the same thing. Productive assets like road infrastructure often has no payback because the government gives them away for free.
And the reason we're losing to China is because China invested in hundreds of Solyndras. You're learning the wrong lesson from Solyndra.