I think minor amounts of debt can be acceptable, if the deficit spending was put to good use, such as investment or dealing with an emergency.
That being said, I'm not advocating speculative investment by the government.
That being said, I'm not unsympathetic to those economists why say that a non-deficit economy is inherently unable to compete with a deficit one, and that our federal government would cost more if not allowed some small debt.
What we have now is far above that, though.