Let me ask a question.
Will you recommend a high school student about to graduate from high school to:
1) Get a job immediately
2) Take a student loan, and go to college.
Actually, let's take an even further step back. What exactly are you against? Surely, you aren't against debt itself, are you? Wall Street executives will call you an idiot, because it's their source of income. People on "main street"? They wouldn't be able to pay for their houses.
Scorning debt for the sake of it being debt is stupid. It's anti-capitalist. In fact, I'll fucking call it socialist:
"...The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.
The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state-creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation-as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven-the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy." - Karl Marx
http://histologion.blogspot.com/2010/02/karl-marx-on-public-debt.html
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Debt and capital is crucial to an economy. It allows for the maximum use of our resources. Let's go back to the student loans. If you imagine a graph where the amount of capital we need is on the y-axis and time is on the x-axis, you'll find that you'll have a huge arc near your early years, then a dip during the middle years, and then another spike during your final years of life. Lending allows people who don't need money right now, to give it to people who need it now.
Cash sitting in the bank, is simply paper. Cash circulating results in resources being moved.
Bad debt, is when things that DON'T PRODUCE FUTURE WEALTH are being financed (and to be more specific, don't produce the amount of wealth that could have been created by financing something with similar risk).
Public spending during a time of depression has enormous returns compared to its costs, compared to austerity, which can permanently depress an economy and cripple entire generations.
