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Politickit:

Thanks for that.
But I'm still not seeing it:

When you get a paycheck, your employer is simply transferring a certain amount of claims on future labor (money) that it owes you - ...claims on future labor. This is vaguely Marxian (or Ricardian?): equation of money to labor. But what about "use value?" A guy can labor for years and receive nothing unless society deems the result valuable. (As an artist I know about this.)

Debt is also claims on future labor. Money is just what we use to trade those claims around with, because it is convenient.
Debt is a claim on the borrower's future labor, or on the lenders?: I guy gets a loan to buy a house, now he has a claim on the carpenter's labor. But the bank has an IOU, a claim on the borrower's future labor. But the only thing gained is the interest paid for the temporary assignment of this claim to borrower.

In other words, debt = money and money = debt.

This seems too abstract to me. I think of one as the opposite of the other

We've heard about the huge contraction in debt that our economy is experiencing from enormous numbers of loans going into default.

But wouldn't that mean there are more claims on future labor than there is labor? In other words, that now a unit of actual labor > a unit of claim on labor (money)? It now takes more of these claim tickets to purchase labor? Isn't this the very definition of inflation?

This squares better with the idea that inflation redistributes money (capital, wealth) from the owner of those credits to the debtor.