debt which you can pay off and which is backed by assets is not much of a problem. Sweden, for example, has a gross debt of something like 30 or 40% of GDP last time I checked, but our net debt is 0 or even negative, IIRC. The situation is worse for countries that have nothing to back up their debt with.
Right, thats why the private sector has a nominally positive net asset value while the public sector has a massively negative one. The public sector technically has very few assets. But the main asset of government (ability to tax going forward, ability to change laws, etc) is not really considered in these calculations.
