It's not exactly difficult. Assets are stuff you have got and can keep whil e liabilities are stuff that you have borrowed and are going to have to giv e back or replace.
Your problem is that you think that the willingness of everybody-who-isn't- a lunatic-right-winger to borrow money now, to sort out some short term pro blem, implies that we don't expect to pay it back once that short term prob lem is solved.
The Global Financial Crisis was precisely that sort of short term problem. The central banks had to borrow a lot of money to prevent it driving the ec onomy into depression, but it worked and the economy is growing again. Betw een 1930 and 1933 a more austere regime shrank the US economy by 25%, which does seem to have done more damage than our current levels of debt.
Probably true. The O.7% of GNP aid target isn't going break anybody's bank, and the aim is to bring the undeserving slobs up to a level when they can dig up their natural resources for themselves, and sell them to us to be tu rned into manufactured products which they will buy back with the money we' ve paid them for the raw materials. There's a more old-fashioned way of get ting the natural resources, but paying for the defense forces required to k eep other predators from pulling the same trick doesn't turn out to be all that cost effective.
The undeserving slobs will do it for us, if they get developed enough to su pport their own defense forces.
They > seem to think all the money we've thus far been able to borrow on t he bond
They don't. They think that it's been just enough to keep us out of recessi on.
Why would they think that? You may be that silly, but real people know the difference between borrowed capital and wholly owned assets, and some are e ven smart enough to appreciate that it can make sense to borrow capital to build up assets with which you can earn money to pay off the initial borrow ing.
Of course you would be. Capital invested in new plant doesn't start paying off until the new plant is working, and return on investment has to be high enough to pay it off over a few years. Anything less than five years tends to be attractive. Anything over about twenty years needs to be very reliab le (and inflation-proof) to be attractive.
Since I was talking about gross domestic product, "rich" and "debt" didn't come into it.
You were complaining that most of the EU was too poor to be able to afford a pot to piss in, and I was pointing out that there are large parts of the EU that have a rather higher per capita income than the UK, and that the av erage per capita income over the EU is about two thirds of the UK average, which might not be "rich" but is scarcely poor either. All of them can affo rd a pot to piss in.
And they are all richer now than the UK was in 1990.