All true.
But it is important to very much highlight the real purposes and motivations for expanding or not expanding the debt.

The prime example for “good” debt borrowing is enhancing the efficiency and performance of the economy, The New Deal. If you live anywhere in America, you can see that was really the last time this was done: bridges, tunnels, berms, roads, airports, harbors, electricity expansion, etc.

These were accompanied/followed by two big misses that still had integrity: Eisenhowers much-lauded creation/expansion of the interstate highways and all the Robert Moses-like projects done across the US. These were, however, in many places double-edged: the highway system was key in the destruction of our rail system, particularly passenger, and the Robert Moses redo’s of our cities along with the roads killed most of our cities (the most efficient way of living).

Still, they were not complete wastes of money. The Republicans looked at the debt as a means of reverting the society to their fantasy of “origins” of American greatness and the rule of an entitled oligarchy.

Republicans and Republican administrations almost single-handedly own the US national debt. Reagan began the fantasy of tax reduction leading to improved tax revenue via presumed economic expansion. The Club for Growth (aka the Republican economic brain trust) folks have carried that water and even been fairly clear that their objective was more to destroy federal programs than to solve the debt. Trump is the apotheosis of this nonsense: tax cuts as the best punch bowl around for floating the administration long enough to finally wreck the functioning of the federal government.

Only this time, there is help from abroad.