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Also, isn't a very high proportion of Japanese debt domestic? Domestic debt still causes problems, through deadweight losses, but from a national perspective, it doesn't mean buying things today at the cost of selling your grandchildren's labour to foreigners.
It does mean redistributing wealth from younger to older generations, though.
True, but those older generations then die, and pass on that wealth to the next generation. The big problem is that generations are not people, so you end up with deadweight losses. For example, the younger person who inherits the national debt might be quite different from the person who would have had more wealth as a result of earning more in their working lives. As people's outcomes in life become more the product of what their parents did, this reduces their own incentives to work hard and smart in order to succeed.
I saw this recently in China, where "Lying Flat" culture (do the bare minimum to avoid getting fired from a job that provides you with an ok lifestyle) is becoming more common. From what people told me and from what I've read, it's because success is increasingly a product of whether your parents are well-connected in/with the Communist Party, rather than whether you are hard-working or innovative. So, after a period where upward mobility encourage a Herculean work culture in China, the younger generations are increasingly reverting to the work ethic of their peasant ancestors: do as little as you can while staying out of trouble, because no matter how hard you work, you will never become an aristocrat. Ironically, "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" is becoming "Capitalism with Feudalist Characteristics."
Similarly, the decline in aristocratic privilege and the necessity of inheritance for wealth were driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment. Unlike almost all of human history, people could rise to wealth and prestige through enterprise, saving, and hard-work, whereas the traditional routes had been (a) being good at splitting open people's heads in battle, (b) marrying up, or (c) being born into wealth.
National debt and intergenerational inequality encourage the same social sickness, by making people's inheritance of wealth more important relative to their own efforts.
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