There's a difference in perception between personal, corporate, and government bankruptcy. Personal bankruptcy is seen as a black mark of either poor personal discipline or a string of bad luck. Corporate bankruptcy is largely ignored, held up in rare cases as a source of embarrassment (but little else), or more often in startup-land, a signal of "experience". Government bankruptcy is something else entirely, and generally unforgivable without significant outside catastrophes. You can blame the politicians, but in a Democratically-elected government, these are your representatives.

Interesting to note on the corporate angle, bankruptcy laws are a fairly-recent invention. (Where by "fairly recent" I mean "several centuries".) The US's laws, in particular, are credited with fostering some of the innovation in this country, as they reduce the impacts of failure.