Money by itself is completely useless.
Imagine two countries. One country puts itself into massive debt building old folks homes and training people to work in them. The other closes their old folks homes to pay down the debt.
Then a few years later, there is a massive need for old folks homes. Which country can afford to pay for them and which can't? The country with massive debt can keep printing money to pay for the old folks homes, but since supply and demand match, they don't have inflation and things are fine. The country with the balanced budget but no old folks homes sees massive inflation because you can't magic old folks homes out of thin air -- it takes time to build them and to train workers. In the mean time because supply and demand are imbalanced the price goes up.
To paraphrase a famous Keynes quote about WW2 -- if you can do something and are willing to prioritize it over everything else you can do, you can afford it no matter how expensive it is. If you don't have the capacity to do something then you can't afford it no matter how much money you have.
> The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP
This is all that is necessary to create a deflationary environment. It means that there are fewer dollars floating around per point of GDP.
Remember that a large portion of government debt in Western countries, particularly Japan, is owed to itself. That's right, the vast majority of the "massive debt" that Japan has, is held by the Bank of Japan. And a lot of their debt is at a rate of 0%. So most of it is essentially "fake debt", they could wipe it out at the stroke of a pen. The only consequence would be on inflation, and Japan is perhaps the only country in the world that doesn't have an inflation problem.