Recently, a letter writer tried to make the point that debt and investment are the same thing. I assume that he was saying that because the USA is trillions of dollars in debt and in his mind, it is not necessarily a bad situation.
Checking a dictionary, here are the definitions I got. Debt: something owed to another; a liability. Investment: to buy something that is expected to yield a profit or produce income. No way do the two words have anything in common. In fact they are as opposite in meaning as you can get. I'll bet that everyone reading this breathed a sigh of relief when they paid off a loan for an auto or a home.
Our national debt is a liability. Our federal government owes money probably to bondholders. And it has reached such proportions that it is now a scary situation. Someday our paper money could be totally worthless. And that would be a national calamity.