When I played Democracy 4 for the first time, I played as USA, and USA has 34 trillion dollars of debt.
Of course, my first thought was "I should pay off the debt". So I did. I slightly raised taxes, I reduced expenses, I balanced the budget, and the debt was decreasing quickly even on maximum difficulty of the game.
However, when the elections came, I lost elections badly. Despite that I literally payed off 30% of debt in my first term, I still lost elections.
So I realised that trying to pay off the debt just means you lose the game, on highest difficulty.
Then I got this idea, why pay off the debt at all? Abolish all taxes, and operate as an entirely debt funded economy.
At first I thought "No way this actually works".
So I did it. I abolished all taxes, I introduced helicopter money, free state housing to maximum, state schools of highest quality, businesses grants, free healthcare, free food, basically whatever service an average voter wants, I did it. And I did it all funded entirely by debt. Literally 0 income in taxes.
The result? Even on highest difficulty, I won 99% of votes 2 times in a row.
My popularity was so high that my party got 150 million votes while the opposing party merely got 2 million.
I literally had 99% approval rate, all while I increased the debt to 100 trillions.
Did the economy collapse? Nope. Apparently, you can increase debt to infinite. It doesnt do anything.