I don’t think people debating public policy want to have reality intrude on them.
The whole debt thing is a colossal red herring. If you don’t have money to run a public education system and you finance it through debt, obviously the next generation is going to be wealthier to a degree that the debt will be worth it. I’ve heard estimates at the effective returns of primary education running 20% to 70%, but you’d have to be stupid to think it’s not as good at 10% or 15%. If you can borrow at 2 or 3 (which is what you can borrow at these days) and invest at 10, and you are paying down your debt, you are just plain stupid.
Not everything is so obviously a good idea as primary education, so people can argue that the thing we are spending money on aren’t effective enough to justify, but whether you have a debt or not, the government shouldn’t be spending money on dumb things to spend money on and should be spending money on the best things to spend money on.
The fact is that there are a ton of good ways to spend money that pretty much pay for themselves immediately, let alone the long term benefits. Single payer public health care costs less money than not single payer public health care. Public daycare costs less money then not public day care. Austerity in the name of paying down debt is foundationally stupid and no one who has passed elementary school math should believe in it.
