Modern theories about government borrowing are just so difficult to understand

Two Guardian pieces which seem to be taking entirely opposite sides of the same point. We suppose we could take that as a welcome diversity of opinion over there but that’s not how they’re presenting it:

Lower income countries spend five times more on debt than coping with the impact of climate change and reducing carbon emissions, according to a leading anti poverty charity.

Figures from Jubilee Debt Campaign show that 34 of the world’s poorest countries are spending $29.4bn (£21.4bn) on debt payments a year compared with $5.4bn (£3.9bn) on measures to reduce the impact of the climate emergency.

If poor countries borrow then this leaves them with an horrendous debt burden that they struggle to service:

In his budget, Rishi Sunak will say the UK needs to cut spending. Don’t believe him

Yes, public debt is high, but the way to bring it down is to invest – starting with the government’s social and climate pledges

If we borrow then it creates the income stream - and more - to service that debt burden.

This is the opposite claim of that first. It’s possible to finesse it into coherence by insisting that we will spend the money sensibly - Hah! - and they do not. But that then calls into question the sense of sending more to those poor countries whether as loans or grants. Why send money to where it will be wasted on things that don’t produce a return? No, we don’t mean some mere financial return to lenders, we mean that sending money to where it produces less value than the starting point is to make us all poorer.

So, there’s the interesting question. Why is it that poor places borrowing leads to unsustainable debt burdens but rich places borrowing leads to paying off the debt?

Our assumption is that it’s just politically convenient - it’s Thursday, isn’t it? - to so insist but perhaps someone can come up with a better piece of argumentation than that.