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Public debt is bad? We are mercilessly eating the future of our children? We must rein in spending right now or else the unimaginable will happen? We need in power those who are committed to fiscal responsibility? But if we turn to this post on Bloomberg, we learn the real problem is not that public and other forms of debt are too big but in short supply:
Demand for debt securities has surpassed issuance five times in the past seven years, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The shortfall is set to continue into 2015, with the New York-based firm predicting demand globally will outstrip supply by about $400 billion as central banks in Japan and Europe step up their own debt purchases.
One of the main forms of debt securities are government bonds. Not only are they pretty safe, they also provide the rentier class (the class of people who can afford to meaningfully buy things like government bonds) with enormous political power. This is one of the best points the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck makes in his new book Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Over the past 40 years, he writes, we moved from the politics of a tax state to that of a debt state. In the tax state, the government basically runs the country from tax revenue. With the debt state, such as the one that fully emerged in the Reagan years, the government cuts taxes for the rich and resorts to debt to fund operations. Instead of paying taxes, the rich buy debt, government bonds. The result is a tiny group of people that have a huge say in how things are run. Their demands must be met before those of the public. As we have shareholder value for corporations (or shareholder value maximization), we now have bondholder value for the state ("...my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders"). Streeck:
...So long as the state’s capacity to repay its creditors can be relied upon, the long-term debt-financing of government activity is definitely in the interests of financial asset-holders. For their victory to be complete, the winners in the distribution struggle in the market and with the tax authorities must be able to invest safely and profitably the capital they have wrested from state and society. They need a state that will not only leave them their money as private property but borrow it and keep it safe, pay interest on it and, last but not least, let them pass it on to their children.
The dark picture in all of this? The bond and its profits are passed on to the children of the rich, but the debt itself is passed on to the children of the rest. This is one of the big consequences of the debt state. It brings an end to private debt and makes it public. This way, the debt doesn't go with the death of a person; the debt becomes universal and eternal. And because it is intergenerational, it shares a key feature with slavery: the inheritance of a curse (rather than a blessing or clean start). If you are born a slave, your children will also be born as slaves.

As a conclusion: The famous French economist Thomas Piketty speaking to the noted American anthropologist David Graeber in a conversation reproduced by the Baffler:

One of the points that I most appreciate in David Graeber’s book is the link he shows between slavery and public debt. As Graeber explains, the intergenerational transmission of debt that slavery embodied has found a modern form in the growing public debt, which allows for the transfer of one generation’s indebtedness to the next. It is possible to picture an extreme instance of this, with an infinite quantity of public debt amounting to not just one, but ten or twenty years of GNP, and in effect creating what is, for all intents and purposes, a slave society, in which all production and all wealth creation is dedicated to the repayment of debt.