No. Like if you have a debt in a deflationary currency.

Start with this: you owe 10% of your income this year as payment for debt. Suppose this is a mortgage and you'll be paying the same amount for the next 15 or 30 years.

Assume that under either inflation or deflation your salary/income changes each year with the inflation/deflation rate. [1]

    Inflation rate of 3%
    Deflation rate of 3%

So year one you pay 10.00% of your income to debt.

Year two: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 9.70%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 10.30%.

Year ten: Percent of income paid to debt under inflation is 7.66%. Percent of income paid to debt under deflation is 13.05%.

[1] We already know this isn't true for many people under inflation, though it hopefully averages out to better than inflation over several years (between bonuses, pay raises, pay bumps from changing jobs). The same will likely be true under deflation.

That is a great way to establish an aristocracy, where only people who are already wealthy can ever start or maintain a business. What do you think venture capitalists are? They are creditors, whose loans enable people to start businesses they could not otherwise afford. Your great idea for disrupting some old entrenched industry will almost certainly need to be funded, and if you are not already wealthy that will mean taking on debt.

Not only that, but there are plenty of people whose businesses need to take on short-term loans to remain competitive. Maybe your business is profitable but you do not have enough capital to fill a really big order -- which could be a great opportunity for your business to grow. If you are not going to take on any debt, then the really big order will be given to your competition, and eventually your business will fail.

Debt is not universally bad; there are a lot of cases where debts make sense. Debt is bad when you cannot repay it, which is why deflation is bad.

Yes let's turn back the economy to the situation before 1940, when most normal people couldn't get credit. What could go wrong ?

The GFC being the a chain reaction started by ~2% less borrowing you say ? Nah, that won't happen "this time".

Like it or not, our economy is based on forgiving debt at the rate of inflation. And it's better than what came before. Can we please stop deluding everyone else ?

I meant fixed costs, i.e. the cost of purchases needed to provide your service/create your product (which you may not have control over).

The worry with deflation isn't that all of a sudden everyone will literally stop spending money ever again. It's that it creates enough incentive to delay purchases and removes enough incentive to invest savings (rather than stuffing the money under a mattress) to shift the economy as a whole to a lower gear. The last time the USA experienced a period of significant deflation, for example, unemployment jumped to 25%. People tending to hold onto cash is the same thing as people tending to not be willing to pay others for work.