Governments rarely spend money as well as people do. This is not to say that government spending is bad or unnecessary. Clearly, we need to fund health care and social services for the needy, education, environmental protection, an adequate military, and investment in the nation's infrastructure. However, bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy and we seem to have crossed that vague frontier a long time ago between what is efficient and necessary, and what is political and vote-worthy. Consider military spending.
Defense spending does create jobs, but little else of economic value.
Think what advances might have been made if some of the talent and resources employed for defense purposes had been directed towards alternative energy research. Every dollar that our government spends has an opportunity cost. If invested in the economy by the private sector, that dollar could normally generate a higher return. It, therefore, does not make a lot of sense for our government to borrow money to finance government spending. The return will never be as great as the cost of borrowing the money, and we will have to allocate more resources simply to service the debt.