Again, Hooey... Debt does not harm the economy, by that logic APPLE is a bad company... they are debt free....
You don't need debt to run or grow an economy.. this is abject junk economics.
When you have a wealthy populace, that not only has savings and spare income, guess what? You wind up creating far more wealth. When Mom and Pop are investing their SAVINGS, they invest in things that are going to make money... when the bank takes that excess in terms of interest, it goes to where a limited number of bankers decide it should go....
You seem to forget it wasn't that long ago, folks went door to door to sell stock in start ups... and those folks that bought it, were regular every day folks who actually saved money and bought everything cash.
Debt is not an economic driver. Debt can be used, to create wealth, but it does have large risks associated with it, that most modern economists ignore. And most every day americans don't use debt in that way at all, they use it because they can't or won't wait for something and end up spending 3 to 4 times the amount on it, than if they had waited.
20% interest to the finance company, doesn't grow the economy, or drive it.. selling more sofa's would.. but you can't sell more sofas if everyone is busy spending 2 to 3 times their cost on ones they already have in their homes.
I do agree with you that it's a myth that extravagant overspending is what keeps the economy going.
Perhaps there should be a distinction between business debt and personal debt but only because of the differences in need and dollar amounts. Most personal debt is for consumption and for assets that depreciate. Business debt is usually for income producing purposes.
Were debt for all magically eliminated and credit suspended except for homes and income producing activities, the economy would take a brief dip long enough for cash to be accumulated and then normal purchasing would resume. It is very similar to reducing taxes. Tax revenues take a brief dip and then start to gradually increase and continue going up.
And where did that money go? Nobody burned it. It wasn't annihilated by anti-money. It went to investors who now have more money to invest.
My point is that all of us have more "stuff" than we need or even know what to do with. If there weren't companies making money by selling that unneeded stuff, then their employees would be out of a job.
Easy credit is the catalyst of a good economy.
Your problem is that you believe that what is good for an individual is good for the whole economy. That's not true at all.
As I said above, some individuals can't handle easy credit, like some can't handle their alcohol. They need help. But the rest of us don't.
As for Apple, they weren't the company that ignited the computer revolution. Microsoft did that by starting a computer culture of perhaps hundreds of thousands of companies, each one building a piece of the puzzle that would have been utterly impossible for any single organization. And many of those companies, I'm sure, were started on the credit card of an entrepreneur that didn't have the years to wait to save the money required, because the market was moving too fast.