I meant to reply to this earlier...
I'm very sorry to hear about your situation, and pleased that you seem to have recovered. As a private consumer, debt can be terrifying especially when economic conditions are a volatile as they've become for most ordinary people these days. It was a staple of my own upbringing.
But (and I'm sorry if I've misinterpreted your intention again) the situations that individual private debtors find themselves in have nothing whatsoever to do with, and are by no means comparable to, national borrowing and public debt.
When you owe payments for your car, you owe it in a currency and at a rate of interest over which you have no control. You cannot absorb the debt simply by lowering the rate of interest or printing the money you owe.
But this is exactly what countries which owe money in their own currencies can do, and have always done, if need be. This is why when Argentina owes creditors in US Dollars, or when Greece or Italy or Spain owe creditors in Euros, it is a serious problem, but why when Japan or Britain or America owes bondholders in Yen or Sterling or Dollars, it is not.
Slashing interest rates (now literally negative in many countries) and printing money (or more accurately, electronically creating credits aka 'Quantitative Easing') is what central banks all around the world have done in response to the crash. At first, strictly as an emergency measure but now increasingly as a matter of standard procedure, which they have very reluctantly adopted due to governments' irresponsible refusal to borrow and spend - which would restore sanity to interest rates and generate actually productive growth rather than inflating asset bubbles with invented quantitative easing money.
Of course, when countries simply print money, there is always a risk of inflation. We are all taught about Weimar, for instance. But central banks today have much better ways of measuring inflation than the central banks of 1920s (which had only just come into existence). And, a far the bigger threat to the economy at present is actually deflation, precisely because of the Eurozone governments and the UK conservatives/coalitions' policy of deliberately contracting economic growth, at the height of the worst recession in 80 years.
That said, we have seen staggering inflation in certain limited categories, namely equity markets (ie: share prices) and real estate, which are very deliberately excluded from conventional measures of inflation (The thinking is, to put it crudely, that you can print as much money as you like so long it is hoarded offshore or in stocks and luxury flats by the ultra-rich, and so long as it never trickles down to ordinary people because this actually would stimulate demand and raise consumer prices). And this systematic distortion of global asset prices, which has emerged
entirely because governments have slashed borrowing and spending - which we are all trained to think of as prudent because we do the same when we have trouble meeting our car loans - will be the cause of the next great financial crash, far bigger than the last, and with far more lasting effects because central banks now no longer have any tools to fight it with.
Anyhow.
Thinking about national debt or even corporate debt in terms of what households encounter during hard times is absurd. The gulf in the scale and function of debt is so vast as to defy even the vaguest comparisons. Any corporation more sophisticated than a neighbourhood grocery store requires regular access to credit to meet day to day obligations. The same is even more true for banks and more true still for governments. What truly broke global capitalism in 2008 was not the US real estate bubble (this was a proximate cause, but not the death blow) but when the paper markets froze (essentially day-to-day lending between banks). Capitalism cannot survive even for hours without borrowing and lending - and that is what caused the 2008 heart attack.
So, you might not have meant it in this way, exactly, but your car troubles have absolutely nothing in common with fiscal policy. Not ever, not even close.
In fact, sound fiscal policy hinges on governments behaving in precisely the opposite way of (aka 'counter-cyclical fiscal policy:
https://blogs.imf.org/2017/04/19/five-keys-to-a-smart-fiscal-policy/)
But, politicians understand that framing government policy in terms of household economics is an extremely effective means of channeling wealth from the public to rentiers and oligarchs, because as you've just demonstrated it is a story that resonates with and reaffirms the hardships that everyday people experience after a crash, even if the comparison is nonsensical. This is the narrative that the cynics in the Conservative Party seized upon (with the backing of the liberal democrats, who, to be fair, went along less out of malicious cunning than a genuinely childish and idealised misunderstanding of how markets actually work).
And that is why there is a growing consensus, not among the loony left or momentum, but finance types, the self-proclaimed grownups in the room, that policies like what Labour and Javid are calling for are
exactly what is needed!!! to restore interest rates, stimulate consumer demand, and ease off the extremely reckless reliance on printing money:
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/11/06/1573068343000/Is-it-time-for-a-shift-in-fiscal-rules--/
Of course, mostly for matters of taste, they will never support Corbyn (at least not publicly), but before Javid came along (and there is real doubt that he will be given the authority to deliver), Labour was the only party in Britain that A) understood and B) had a plan to implement sound fiscal policy.
Finally, investing in local infrastructure is
exactly what governments should be doing when there is a recession. The knock-on effects in terms of employement and productivity are unparalleled, and Britain has the poorest infrastructure and transit in Europe by some distance, bar perhaps Germany (which clings to idiotic fiscal limits of its own).
Every government in the world should maintain a list of projects to be funded as soon as a recession is looming - instead, in coalition Britain, we had a de facto list of programmes and projects to eliminate or attack beyond recognition, and that lasting harm from
that approach is beyond obvious to all but the most credulous of those who 'identify' as free-market liberals.
