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How long do we expect roads to last? Or the investments that have to be made over someone's lifetime to enable them to retire? Even the big "high tech" weapons and aircraft investments which consume a big chunk of spending have 30-50 year project lifetime. The B-52 fleet is 55 years old, not counting the design time. Is it not reasonable to spread payment for that over the lifetime of the asset?

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The financing of long-term Public Goods has to be one of the best arguments for government debt there is.

I'm not against debt[0] so much as I like interesting units and metrics. If you want to compare debt levels of different countries across history getting the local currency to cancel out means no converting 1870 dollars to 2019 dollars, no converting 1920 Yen to 1995 Azerbaijani Manats, etc.

The fact that Debt-to-GDP reduces to years, even if it's unclear what that means, lets us make years-to-years comparisons and makes charts like this possible[1].

[0] - Though I think what it's being spent on really matters cough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gdp_to_debt_...

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