&#62; How is discouraging people to save and pay their debts good for anyone or society as a whole?<p>In a time of economic slowness, it benefits the society as a whole more if you increase your marginal spending (spend more cents of every dollar), because that keeps money flowing through the system.  Of course, that means we'd want to create incentives to pay debts off and save when the economy's going well (which also has the benefit of controlling growth).<p>In America, we've become more and more dependent on consumer spending as the engine of our economy, so we keep incentivizing it beyond reason, even in boom times.  That's what's causing the personal debt levels we're seeing.