> On a personal level, if I were lending money to a desperate down-and-out friend who had exhaused all the normal sources of credit including their family, I would probably also ask for lifestyle changes before giving them money.
While it might seem reasonable from a personal perspective, I don't think it really applies when you're considering an entire country (or any sovereign entity, for that matter). This mistake has been made before, and in many fields, so I don't blame you particularly (e.g. we think of personal indebtedness as "immoral" but deficit spending has largely been shown to be bountiful and a net positive when managed correctly).
I'm personally not well versed in economics or genius enough to suggest alternatives, but I just wanted to point out that kind of fallacy when thinking about these things.
Actually in this case the analogy is completely correct. The notion that government borrowing is wildly different from household or corporate borrowing is only true in a limited sense, and only if we are talking about borrowing in a currency that the government itself issues.
The IMF demands payment in Dollars/Euros, not the local currency. A country borrowing money has a hard requirement to pay back the loan in real (as opposed to nominal) terms. So it really is similar to any other lending.
Let me also address deficit spending. It isn't such a magic bullet that a government can come up with more money to repay a loan by increasing its expenditures. It's about the same idea as the Laffer Curve. Sure, if things get extreme enough, the argument is correct. But most of the time things aren't that extreme. Most of the time, when a government needs to repay loans, fiscal discipline is useful and necessary.
While it might seem reasonable from a personal perspective, I don't think it really applies when you're considering an entire country (or any sovereign entity, for that matter). This mistake has been made before, and in many fields, so I don't blame you particularly (e.g. we think of personal indebtedness as "immoral" but deficit spending has largely been shown to be bountiful and a net positive when managed correctly).
I'm personally not well versed in economics or genius enough to suggest alternatives, but I just wanted to point out that kind of fallacy when thinking about these things.