There are essentially 2 kinds of debt

[hfojvt]

44. except, once again, I would say it buys in to Republican Spin

the spin that says - debt only comes from spending.

No, there is a third kind of debt - one caused by "giving up your income".

Debt, after all, comes about when expenses are greater than revenue. Clearly some debt can be caused by - reducing the amount of revenue you take in, and not just by either spending or investing too much.

When I taught macroeconomics back in the late 1980s, the formulation from the textbook (written by the conservative Campbell McConnell, who was a professor at Nebraska where I went to graduate school) was that at that time our National Debt had three basic causes
1. wars
2. recessions
3. tax cuts

wars are on the spending side
recessions impact both spending (increasing it as the number of people in need of help increases) and revenue (decreasing it as the number of employed people paying taxes is less).
tax cuts were mostly a post-Reagan phenomenon, at least tax cuts large enough to cause significant debt accumulation.

And, of course, George W. Bush gave us the trifecta.