Debt is a distributional issue because it arises when people don't have enough wealth or income to support their needs. In the immortal Adam Smith quote:

By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensibly necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person, of either sex, would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France, they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning, by this appellation, to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life; and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.

In another order of things, debt arises when people don't have the resources to carry out their projects and somebody else does. The ability to mobilize idle resources has been condensed into money (this is not entirely a bad thing). In the old days of metallic money the money stock was limited by what precious metals could be dug out of the ground. Today, with fiat money, we are fortunate that the money to mobilize resources for worthy purposes can be created ex nihilo. This highlights that money and credit are not just distributional issues, they're about power (the socially recognised power to mobilize resources) and therefore they're deeply political.

To err is of course human. But to mess things up spectacularly, we need an elite — Yanis Varoufakis