A lot of my views come from operating perhaps the lowest level of "government" possible: a large HOA. Our CC&Rs prohibit entering into any contract (including debt) lasting more than a year. It works for us because the entire place is run by volunteers, many of them nonspecialists, who could do a lot of damage getting us into, say, a 10-year contract with Comcast that was too expensive, not negotiated well, etc.
I think we expect our politicians to be superheroes. This might be borderline reasonable for large, well-funded federal agencies like the Federal Reserve, BLS, BEA, etc who can attract large numbers of truly great people, and pay them well. It's not reasonable to expect someone like Tim Geithner or Ben Bernake (a Princeton economics PhD) to run the finances of a small city or HOA. You're going to get part-time volunteers who know how to balance their checkbooks. Expecting these people to be perfectly rational decision-makers without formal accounting training, let alone knowing how to think carefully about how to analyze NPV, cashflows, and long-term liabilities, in the face of all kinds of local small-ball politics (e.g. trying to help their friend win a contract, or a personal vendetta against someone's project) is laughably far from realistic.